MAY 2023 SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.

COM
The Weight of
Empty Space

Redesigning
Living Matter

Understanding
Witch Hunts

Destination
Jupiter
New missions
will explore moons
with oceans that
could harbor life

© 2023 Scientific American

 M ay 2 0 2 3
VO LU M E 3 2 8 , N U M B E R 5
SPECIAL REPORT
28 The Many Worlds
of Jupiter
P L A N E TA RY S C I E N C E
30 Missions to the Moons
A new European spacecraft is
the first of two probes that will
hunt for signs of habitability
on Jupiter’s icy satellites.
By Jonathan O’Callaghan
37 Alien Oceans
Six moons of the outer solar
system may hold vast amounts
of liquid water and, with it, life.
By Rebecca Boyle and
Juan Velasco
42 Planetary Art
Citizen scientists blend creativity
and research using data from
NASA’s Juno probe.
Photograph by Vincent Fournier
62
SOCIAL SCIENCE
44 Witch Hunts
Vicious attacks on women often
accompany economic upheavals.
By Silvia Federici and
Alice Markham-Cantor
BIOENGINEERING
54 Designing Life
Synthetic morphology is coaxing
living matter into novel shapes
and forms. B
 y Philip Ball
PA R T I C L E P H Y S I C S
62 The Weight of Nothing
The Archimedes experiment aims
to measure the void of empty ON THE C OVE R
space more precisely than ever Jupiter and its intriguing moons, which may
before. By Manon Bischoff hide buried oceans, will soon get a visit from
two new missions. The roving storms on
S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y the giant planet are highlighted in this citizen
74 Let’s Take the Bus scientist–created image, which exaggerates
cloud height, based on data from the
More appealing electric buses
JunoCam instrument on the Juno probe.
could help solve the climate crisis. Photograph by NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/
By Kendra Pierre-Louis MSSS/Kevin M. Gill, © CC by 3.0 Unported.
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 1
© 2023 Scientific American
 wmaster890/Getty Images
Brian Stauffer

Izhar Cohen
10 12 86

4 From the Editor 24 Meter asteroid impact, Earth’s last

The poetry of two rivers turning major blow. B
 y Phil Plait
6 Letters to one. B
 y Marianne Karplus
84 Reviews
8 Science Agenda 25 The Science of Health Allergies on the rise. A near-future
An impartial commission that You don’t really need 10,000 noir of “rejuvenated” humans.
examines our COVID response daily steps to stay healthy. Political power of dried plants.
would provide answers about what By Lydia Denworth Your brain on music.
went wrong and help us prepare for By Amy Brady
the next pandemic. By the Editors 26 Q&A
Researchers are using sensors and 86 Observatory
10 Forum AI to understand animal commu- False “facts” about science
Pundits are weaponizing disgust nication—and begin to talk back. and Social Security abound.
to fuel violence, and it’s affecting By Sophie Bushwick By Naomi Oreskes
our humanity.
By Bryn Nelson 80 Mind Matters 87 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago
Friends make scary experiences By Mark Fischetti
12 Advances even more frightening.
Untangling fungal networks that By Susana Martinez-Conde and 88 Graphic Science
connect tree roots. Arctic foxes’ Stephen Macknik Genetics can better predict
extensive wandering. Dried-up dog traits than breeds.
analog for Martian lakes. A bionic 82 The Universe By Clara Moskowitz,
finger’s informative poke. Revisiting the Chelyabinsk Emily V. Dutrow and MSJONESNYC

Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), Volume 328, Number 5, May 2023, published monthly by Scientific American, a division of Springer Nature America, Inc., 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, N.Y. 10004-
1562. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post International Publications Mail (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 40012504. Canadian BN No. 127387652RT;
TVQ1218059275 TQ0001. Publication Mail Agreement #40012504. Return undeliverable mail to Scientific American, P.O. Box 819, Stn Main, Markham, ON L3P 8A2. Individual Subscription rates: 1 year $59.00
(USD), Canada $72.00 (USD), International $82.00 (USD). I nstitutional Subscription rates: S chools and Public Libraries: 1 year $84 (USD), Canada $89 (USD), International $96 (USD). Businesses and Colleges/
Universities: 1 year $399 (USD), Canada $405 (USD), International $411 (USD). Postmaster: Send address changes and subscription payments to Scientific American, Box 3187, Harlan, Iowa 51537. R  eprints
inquiries: R andP@sciam.com. To request single copies or back issues, call (800) 333-1199. Subscription inquiries: U.S. and Canada (800) 333-1199; other (515) 248-7684. S end e-mail to scacustserv@
cdsfulfillment.com. P rinted in U.S.A. Copyright © 2023 by Scientific American, a division of Springer Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American
maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

2 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

FROM
THE EDITOR Laura Helmuth is editor in chief of Scientific American. 
Follow her on Twitter @laurahelmuth

Reality vs. Magic
Do you remember learning about New England witch trials for
the first time, maybe in an elementary school history class?
I remember being horrified and incredulous—they threw you in
a river? And if you drowned, that meant you were innocent?
Witch trials seemed like an episode from a fairy tale, something
that happened unimaginably long ago during a dark, mean and
superstitious age. Well, the darkness and meanness and super-
stitions have persisted. QAnon conspiracists claim that U.S. soci-
ety is run by Satan-worshipping child abusers—witches, basical-
ly. In many countries today, women (and sometimes men or
children) are still accused of using magic to cause accidents or
other trouble. Their neighbors, justifying their violence by claim-
ing they’re punishing a witch, torture and kill them. It all seems
so nonsensical and awful, but as historian Silvia Federici and
writer Alice Markham-Cantor discuss on page 44, throughout
history certain kinds of economic upheaval have increased the
risk that witchcraft accusations will erupt and spread.
Let’s mentally leave this planet for a moment. What’s your
favorite planet that isn’t Earth? Many of the scientists, journal-
ists and science fans I know are passionately Team Saturn or Team
Jupiter. Our cover package makes a great case for Jupiter and its
moons being the most awesome places in our solar system. We’re
about to learn a lot more about them, as journalist Jonathan
O’Callaghan tells us on page 30, thanks to two new missions:
JUICE and Clipper. They’ll evaluate Europa and Ganymede for po­­
tential habitability. Starting on page 37, Scientific American c on-
tributor Rebecca Boyle and graphic artist Juan Velasco depict the
interiors of Jupiter’s most intriguing moons and where they might
have heat and oceans. We end the report with some gorgeous
images of Jupiter that were created by citizen scientists (page 42).
The “worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics”
has to do with the amount of energy in a vacuum. Researchers
have two ways of calculating the answer . . . but the results are
wildly divergent. Now an experiment, named Archimedes, aims
to get the best data yet to determine the weight of nothing. The-
oretical physicist Manon Bischoff, an editor at S  pektrum, the
German-language partner publication of S  cientific American,
takes us deep into a tunnel in Sardinia (page 62) to show how
the delicate experiment will be run and explain the high stakes.
Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the
U.S. Car emissions have lessened dramatically over the decades,
decreasing smog and lead pollution. New technologies for elec-
tric vehicles, hybrids and highly fuel-efficient cars can help. But
one of the simplest solutions for improving transportation—for
our climate, safety and quality of life—is more and better buses.
Climate journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis makes a great case for why
and how more areas should enhance their bus systems (page 74).
An emerging field called synthetic morphology experiments
with the structure and function of living things. As author and
former N ature editor Philip Ball describes on page 54, the goal
is to understand how development works naturally while mak-
ing new types of life-forms that have useful functions. Scientists
hope to incorporate living tissue cultures, some of which are
genetically engineered, to create “superorgans” or replacement
parts—even life-forms we can only imagine.

BOARD OF ADVISERS
Robin E. Bell Jonathan Foley John Maeda
Research Professor, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Executive Director, Project Drawdown Chief Technology Officer, Everbridge

Columbia University Jennifer A. Francis Satyajit Mayor

Emery N. Brown
Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering
and of Computational Neuro­science, M.I.T.,
and Warren M. Zapol Prof­essor of Anesthesia, Harvard Medical School
Vinton G. Cerf
Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
Emmanuelle Charpentier
Scientific Director, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology,
and Founding and Acting Director, Max Planck Unit for the
Science of Pathogens
Rita Colwell
Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland College Park
and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Kate Crawford
Research Professor, University of Southern California Annenberg,
and Co-founder, AI Now Institute, New York University
Nita A. Farahany
Professor of Law and Philosophy, Director,
Duke Initiative for Science & Society, Duke University
Senior Scientist and Acting Deputy Director,
Woodwell Climate Research Center
Carlos Gershenson
Research Professor, National Autonomous University of Mexico,
and Visiting Scholar, Santa Fe Institute
Alison Gopnik
Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor
of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley
Lene Vestergaard Hau
Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics,
Harvard University
Hopi E. Hoekstra
Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Curator of Mammals,
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Co-founder, Urban Ocean Lab, and
Co-founder, The All We Can Save Project
Christof Koch
Chief Scientist, MindScope Program, Allen Institute for Brain Science
Meg Lowman
Director and Founder, TREE Foundation, Rachel Carson Fellow,
Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, and Research Professor,
University of Science Malaysia
Senior Professor, National Center for Biological Sciences,
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
John P. Moore
Professor of Microbiology and Immunology,
Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Priyamvada Natarajan
Professor of Astronomy and Physics, Yale University
Donna J. Nelson
Professor of Chemistry, University of Oklahoma
Lisa Randall
Professor of Physics, Harvard University
Martin Rees
Astronomer Royal and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and
Astrophysics, Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge
Daniela Rus
Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science and Director, CSAIL, M.I.T.
Meg Urry
Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Director,
Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Yale University
Amie Wilkinson
Professor of Mathematics, University of Chicago

4 Scientific American, May 2023 Illustration by Nick Higgins

© 2023 Scientific American

LETTERS
editors@sciam.com

“Vitamin D supplementation is likely

of little benefit to most people who wish
to avoid osteoporosis. But smoking cessation
is certainly of great benefit.”
daniel spitzer p iermont, n.y.

ple who wish to avoid osteoporosis. But not just “us” who use the calories we con-
smoking cessation—or, better yet, never sume, making the “calories in, calories out”
smoking—is certainly of great benefit. formulation Pontzer cites incomplete.
Daniel Spitzer P iermont, N.Y. Ira S. Nash Scarsdale, N.Y.

METABOLIC PATH PONTZER REPLIES: U  nderstanding the

LESS TRAVELED considerable variability we see among in-
I enjoyed “The Human Engine,” Herman dividuals in their daily energy expendi-
Pontzer’s article on rigorous experiments ture is the next frontier in metabolic re-
January 2023 that determine the age- and lean-mass-ad- search. We now have a good sense for how
justed trends of human metabolism. The box body size, fat percentage, lifestyle and age
“Measuring Metabolism” shows these data affect the calories we burn every day, but
SMOKING AND BONE HEALTH in two graphs, and the large degree of scat- as readers Kuzyk and Nash point out,
Claudia Wallis nicely summarizes issues ter about their respective regression curves there is a lot of unexplained variation. The
surrounding bone health and calcium leads to even more interesting questions. degree to which these differences reflect ge-
metabolism in “A Diet for Better Bones” Each scatter point represents a unique netics or environment is not well under-
[The Science of Health]. She mentions the human being who is most likely not “aver- stood at the moment. Our microbiome may
likely deleterious effects of excess alcohol age.” Can the scatter explain why certain well be a critical piece of the puzzle. The ev-
and coffee intake in the article. To this list, individuals have more difficulty losing idence on that front is currently sparse,
I would add cigarettes—in any quantity weight or why a particular diet might not however. Time and more study will tell.
and at almost any time in life. work for everyone? How much of it is We don’t typically find that a “fast” or
A routine part of my practice as a linked to genetics versus environment? Is “slow” metabolism (burning more or less en-
neurosurgeon was the evaluation of pa- it ethical to make health recommendations ergy than we’d expect for a person’s size
tients with osteoporosis and the perfor- based on a sample mean when those off the and age) predicts weight gain or obesity. I
mance of spinal surgery, including fusion. regression curve might be harmed? Fur- do suspect that the metabolic variation we
I rapidly saw that almost all my patients thermore, new cancer therapies tailor see is telling us something about overall
with osteoporosis had smoked, although treatments to an individual’s genetics. Are bodily function and health, but those possi-
many of them would initially deny a histo- such considerations being applied to stud- ble connections are yet to be tested.
ry of cigarette consumption until specifi- ies of diet and metabolism?
cally asked if they had smoked as a teenag- Mark G. Kuzyk Regents Professor of LOCALITY LOOPHOLE
er. Even a short history of cigarette use dur- Physics, Washington State University “The Universe Is Not Locally Real,” by
ing the prime period for bone growth and Daniel Garisto, reports on how the Bell test
ossification—adolescence and early adult- I was surprised that Pontzer’s article about has been used to rule out the existence of
hood—was correlated with a significant in- human metabolism made no mention of the hidden variables, unseen factors that could
crease in the risk of osteoporotic fractures gut microbiota. Each of us coexists with a explain quantum-mechanical phenomena
during late adulthood. complex gut ecosystem that contains more while preserving local realism. But I’m still
Similarly the rate of successful spinal sur- organisms than there are cells in our body. puzzled why answering the question of hid-
gery—particularly discectomy and fusion— Recent discoveries have made it clear that den variables has not been declared unsolv-
among active smokers was appreciably low- the gut microbiota influences many aspects able by this technique.
er than that for nonsmokers, so I would of our physiology, from immune function to Garisto says “any prior physical connec-
postpone nonemergent surgery until the mental health, and alterations to it induced tion between components, n  o matter how
patient had been free of cigarette smoke for by widespread use of antibiotics and high- distant in the past [emphasis mine], has
at least four—and ideally six—weeks. Over ly processed foods most likely play a critical the possibility of interfering with the valid-
the ensuing decades numerous studies have role in explaining the epidemic of obesity. ity of a Bell test’s results.” He then describes
validated my anecdotal observations. The gut microbiota is also the filter through a “cosmic Bell test” in which researchers
As Wallis notes, vitamin D supplemen- which all of our food is processed, linking it used stars that were “sufficiently far apart”
tation is likely of little benefit to most peo- inextricably with human metabolism. It is so that the light from one wouldn’t reach

6 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 ESTABLISHED 1845

EDITOR IN CHIEF
Laura Helmuth
MANAGING EDITOR Jeanna Bryner COPY DIRECTOR Maria-Christina Keller CREATIVE DIRECTOR Michael Mrak
the other for centuries. But assuming that EDITORIAL
the big bang and cosmic inflation are true, CHIEF FEATURES EDITOR Seth Fletcher CHIEF NEWS EDITOR Dean Visser CHIEF OPINION EDITOR Megha Satyanarayana
doesn’t that mean there is an unavoidable FEATURES
SENIOR EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Mark Fischetti SENIOR EDITOR, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY Madhusree Mukerjee
loophole in e very Bell test because every- SENIOR EDITOR, MEDICINE / SCIENCE POLICY Josh Fischman SENIOR EDITOR, TECHNOLOGY / MIND Jen Schwartz
SENIOR EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Clara Moskowitz SENIOR EDITOR, EVOLUTION / ECOLOGY Kate Wong
thing was physically connected in the dis-
NEWS AND OPINION
tant past? SENIOR EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Lee Billings ASSOCIATE EDITOR, TECHNOLOGYSophie Bushwick
SENIOR EDITOR, HEALTH AND MEDICINE Tanya Lewis Andrea Thompson
ASSOCIATE EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY
Gary Rector C  ave Creek, Ariz. SENIOR EDITOR, MIND / BRAIN Gary Stix ASSOCIATE EDITOR, HEALTH AND MEDICINE Lauren J. Young
SENIOR OPINION EDITOR Dan Vergano ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR Sarah Lewin Frasier
NEWS REPORTER Meghan Bartels
GARISTO REPLIES: There have been addi- MULTIMEDIA
Jeffery DelViscio Andrea Gawrylewski
tional cosmic Bell tests since the one I de- CHIEF MULTIMEDIA EDITOR
SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Tulika Bose
CHIEF NEWSLETTER EDITOR
CHIEF AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Sunya Bhutta
scribed in my article, including one that MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Kelso Harper ASSOCIATE ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Arminda Downey-Mavromatis

used light from quasars that are separated ART

SENIOR GRAPHICS EDITOR Jen Christiansen PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR Monica Bradley ART DIRECTOR, ONLINE Ryan Reid
by billions of light-years. Rector is correct ASSOCIATE GRAPHICS EDITOR Amanda Montañez ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR Liz Tormes

that even these tests go back only so far. As COPY & PRODUCTION
SENIOR COPY EDITORS Angelique Rondeau, Aaron Shattuck ASSOCIATE COPY EDITOR Emily Makowski
he suggests, this does imply that the big MANAGING PRODUCTION EDITOR Richard Hunt PREPRESS AND QUALITY MANAGER Silvia De Santis

bang remains an unavoidable loophole. CONTRIBUTOR S

Mariette DiChristina, John Rennie
EDITORS EMERITI
It’s worth considering what such a loop- EDITORIAL Rebecca Boyle, Amy Brady, Katherine Harmon Courage, Lydia Denworth, Ferris Jabr,

hole-sized theory would presuppose: that Anna Kuchment, Michael D. Lemonick, Robin Lloyd, Steve Mirsky, Melinda Wenner Moyer,
George Musser, Ricki L. Rusting, Dava Sobel, Claudia Wallis, Daisy Yuhas
hidden variables were encoded at the very ART Edward Bell, Violet Isabelle Frances, Lawrence R. Gendron, Nick Higgins, Kim Hubbard, Katie Peek, Beatrix Mahd Soltani
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT SUPERVISOR Maya Harty SENIOR EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Brianne Kane
beginning of time and space, deterministi-
cally setting everything into motion until SCIENTIFIC A MERIC AN CUS TOM MEDIA
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Cliff Ransom CREATIVE DIRECTOR Wojtek Urbanek
spacetime’s end. CHIEF MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Kris Fatsy SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Ben Gershman SENIOR EDITOR Dan Ferber
Dharmesh Patel Samantha Lubey
Superdeterminism, as this idea is called, SENIOR ENGAGEMENT EDITOR SENIOR PUBLISHING MANAGER

might rescue local realism from quantum PRESIDENT

Kimberly Lau
mechanics, yet it strips the universe of PUBLISHER AND VICE PRESIDENT Jeremy A. Abbate
VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCT AND TECHNOLOGY Dan Benjamin
chance in favor of a conspiratorial ap- VICE PRESIDENT, COMMERCIAL Andrew Douglas
proach to experiments. Everything that we VICE PRESIDENT, CONTENT SERVICES Stephen Pincock

can measure suggests that quantum me- CLIENT MEDIA SOLUTIONS

HEAD, PUBLISHING STRATEGY Suzanne Fromm
chanics is correct, that local realism is false. DIRECTORS, INTEGRATED MEDIA Matt Bondlow, Stan Schmidt
MARKETING PROGRAM MANAGER Leeor Cohen
It’s worthwhile to be aware of superdeter- PROGRAMMATIC PRODUCT MANAGER Zoya Lysak
minism as a possibility. But believing in DIGITAL ADVERTISING OPERATIONS MANAGER Lizzie Ng

PRODUC T & TECHNOLOGY

things because they are impossible to rule Jason Goldstein, Mike Howsden
DIRECTORS
out is a poor way to approach science—or, Ian Kelly, Miguel Olivares
PRODUCT MANAGERS
DIGITAL PRODUCER Isabella Bruni
for that matter, anything else. ENGINEERS Kenneth Abad, Ruben Del Rio, Haronil Estevez, Michael Gale, Akwa Grembowski, Stephen Tang
DATA ANALYST Jackie Clark

BEE INTELLIGENT
Bumblebees apparently “play,” according to
the study reported in “Bee-Ball,” by Grace
van Deelen [Advances]. This raises a ques-
tion: Are bees individually intelligent? How
about ants? Within a colony these insects
are continuously exchanging information
in the form of pheromones and other chem-
icals. A bee or ant colony manifests more in-
telligence than would be expected by sum-
ming the intelligence of the individuals.
Van Snyder L  a Crescenta, Calif.
ERRATUM
In “Primordial Soup,” by Clara Moskowitz
[March 2023], the box “Quark Soup” should
have said that Brookhaven National Labo-
ratory’s sPHENIX and STAR detectors each
have a powerful magnet at their core, not
a powerful superconducting magnet. Only
sPHENIX’s magnet is superconducting.
CONSUMER MARKETING
HEAD, MARKETING Christopher Monello
SENIOR COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS COORDINATOR Christine Kaelin
MARKETING COORDINATOR Justin Camera
ANCILL ARY PRODUC TS
ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Diane McGarvey
CUSTOM PUBLISHING EDITOR Lisa Pallatroni
C O R P O R AT E
SENIOR COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER Sarah Hausman
PRINT PRODUC TION
PRODUCTION CONTROLLER Madelyn Keyes-Milch ADVERTISING PRODUCTION MANAGER Michael Broomes
ADVERTISING PRODUCTION CONTROLLER Michael Revis-Williams
LE T TER S TO THE EDITOR
Scientific American, 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, NY 10004-1562 or editors@sciam.com
Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we cannot answer each one.
Join the conversation online—visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter.
H O W T O C O N TA C T U S
Subscriptions Reprints Permissions
For new subscriptions, renewals, gifts, To order bulk reprints of articles For permission to copy or reuse material:
payments, and changes of address: (minimum of 1,000 copies): Permissions Department, Scientific
U.S. and Canada, 800-333-1199; RandP@sciam.com. American, 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4600,
outside North America, 515-248-7684 Reprint Department, New York, NY 10004-1562; RandP@sciam.com;
or scacustserv@cdsfulfillment.com Scientific American, www.ScientificAmerican.com/permissions.
Submissions 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4600, Please allow six to eight weeks for processing.
To submit article proposals, follow the New York, NY Advertising
guidelines at www.ScientificAmerican.com. 10004-1562; www.ScientificAmerican.com has electronic
Click on “Contact Us.” 212-451-8415. contact information for sales representatives
We cannot return and are not responsible For single copies of back issues: of Scientific American in all regions
for materials delivered to our office. 800-333-1199. of the U.S. and in other countries.

May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 7

© 2023 Scientific American

SCIENCE AGENDA
O PINI O N A N D A N A LYS I S FR OM
S C IENTIFIC A MERIC AN ’ S B OA R D O F E D ITO R S
Pandemic
Reckoning
After Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and other
major calamities, the U.S. has
examined itself to see how to prevent
the next catastrophe
By the Editors
In better times, the U.S. has, with some humility, owned up to
its failures. Commissions have investigated tragedies such as
Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Presidential blue-ribbon panels bulwarked
the Social Security program in 1983 and overhauled nasa’s space
shuttle program after the 1986 Challenger disaster.
Three years into the COVID pandemic, more than 1.1 mil-
lion Americans have died of the illness, and millions more are
living with long COVID. How did the nation judged most pre-
pared for an epidemic or pandemic in 2019 suffer a death rate
so much worse than those of peers such as Canada, Germany or
Japan? These are historic failures, and with the Biden adminis-
tration and Congress coming to a rare agreement that the na­­
tional health emergency should now end, we need an honest
examination of this tragedy and what led to it.
No one is asking in a comprehensive way why states under-
staffed public health agencies, the federal government left emer-
gency supply shelves empty, test makers were unready for man-
ufacturing, social media and cable news outlets let misinfor-
mation run rampant, and everyone ignored past warnings of
all these pitfalls. A bill creating a national task force on the
COVID pandemic languished in the U.S. Senate. At least eight
versions of this task force—modeled on the 9/11 Commission
and supported by leading medical and scientific figures in the
U.S.—have been proposed and gone nowhere in Congress, ac­­
cord­ing to the Congressional Research Service.
How can we prevent another pandemic if we will not ask
what happened? We need answers for the millions and count-
ing who have been devastated by this disease.
We call on Congress and the Biden administration to sup-
port a comprehensive COVID Commission to better under-
stand the depths of this disaster and to point the way toward
stopping the next global outbreak of a new and deadly trans-
missible disease.
Short of this, a grieving nation will be left with a patchwork
of unconnected investigations of failures, such as the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention’s travails in the initial re­­
sponse, and successes, which include the work on mRNA vac-
cines. There was a Commonwealth Fund report calling for
stronger public health agencies. There were too brief advisories
from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and
Medicine, a body first chartered during the Civil War to advise
8 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
the U.S. government on that national cataclysm. Congressional
committees published Trump administration e-mails in 2021
showing political interference with science. In September 2022
a White House steering committee on “pandemic innovation”
released a studiously boring report. It was, at best, a final whim-
per of the Biden administration’s call for increased pandemic
funding, which had been stripped from last year’s budget deal.
No matter how well intended, none of these efforts exam-
ined the totality of the U.S. pandemic response, so none can
serve as a focal point for the country to understand what it has
gone through. We had hoped that President Joe Biden would
call for such a reckoning during his recent State of the Union
speech, but the only look back he promised was for fraudsters
who stole relief funds. And many House Republicans who have
unwaveringly misled their supporters on COVID—needlessly
costing lives—have now begun their own unserious hearings
aimed at demonizing the federal research agencies behind the
very vaccines that saved millions of lives in the pandemic.
We live in a cynical age, and doubts about the prospects of a
pandemic commission come all too easily. Yet political scientist
Jordan Tama has found high-level commissions to be surpris-
ingly influential in American politics, particularly presidential-
ly appointed ones that aim for structural reforms. Those are
the kinds of assessments we need now. We need to know when
it is best to use travel bans and masks. We need to know how
schools, businesses and hospitals should respond—before the
next pandemic hits.
There’s plenty of blame to go around in the COVID outbreak,
starting with China’s silencing of warnings—an authoritarian
response that spurred the spread of the COVID-causing virus
SARS-CoV-2 worldwide. The scientific community, the medical
system and, not least, the press all made countless mistakes in
the U.S. response to the pandemic, not just government agen-
cies and elected officials. But none of that matters more than
stopping another pandemic from wreaking the same havoc.
Given the division of the national moment, perhaps the most
appropriate and authoritative path for a U.S. panel would emu-
late the truth and reconciliation commissions that have helped
countries face deep national traumas—apartheid in South Afri-
ca, a murderous dictatorship in Chile and other such ordeals—
by seeking restorative justice. The U.S. may need just such an
effort after a global pandemic that has ripped the country apart.
No nation weathered the pandemic without fault or blemish, but
none had a right to expect better results, with less to show for
those expectations, than the U.S. We no longer work, live or view
the country the way we did before.
A reckoning, whether it comes in the form of a truth and
reconciliation commission, a blue-ribbon panel or something
akin to the 9/11 Commission, could help us repair the rifts cre-
ated by our fragmented response and excruciating losses. In
his 2023 State of the Union address, Biden described the devas-
tation. “Families grieving. Children orphaned. Empty chairs at
the dining room table,” he said. “We remember them, and we
re­­main vigilant.”
 An installation of white flags in 2021 on the National Mall
in Washing­ton, D.C., honored the many lives lost to COVID.
But it’s a curious kind of remembrance and vigilance that
Biden and his colleagues in Congress envision, one that mostly
looks ahead for new variants and vaccines rather than asking
how we lost so many lives and ruined so many more.
BriVisu/Getty Images
The last truly successful national commission, the 9/11 Com-
mission, conducted a bipartisan investigation into how nearly
3,000 people died on one awful day. Three years into the pan-
demic more Americans were dying every week from COVID
© 2023 Scientific American
than were lost on 9/11. That amounted to more than 15,000
people gone in January alone, a brutal count added to an ever
growing number.
If one death is a tragedy, what are more than one million
dead? In the end, are those lost in the pandemic—each grand-
parent, parent or child—just numbers to the American people?
To our elected officials?
The time has come for an answer.
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 9
FORUM
C OMM E N TA RY O N S C IE N C E IN
T H E N E W S FR OM T H E E X PE R T S
Weaponi­za­tion
of Disgust
Vilifying a person or group of people is
linked to increased violence against them
By Bryn Nelson
Before the 2022 m  idterm elections, David DePape, accused of
attacking Representative Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, posted a
slew of online rants that included references to QAnon, a conspir-
acy theory that claims that Democratic, Satan-worshipping pedo-
philes are trying to control the world’s politics and media.
Three weeks after the assault on Paul Pelosi, a shooter killed
five and wounded 17 at Club Q, an LGBTQ club in Colorado
Springs, Colo. The suspect, who has a troubling history of threats
and violence, had created a website with racist images and vid-
eos that glorified mass shootings.
Neither attack was an isolated incident. With the support of
former president Donald Trump, the QAnon conspiracy theory
has contributed to a widening spiral of threats and violence,
including the deadly January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection
spurred by lies of a “stolen election.” Right-wing media person-
alities and activists have created or amplified conspiracy theo-
ries about Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, and others.
Dehumanizing and vilifying a person or group of people can
provoke what scholars and law-enforcement officials call stochas-
tic terrorism, in which ideologically driven hate speech increases
the likelihood that people will attack the targets of vicious claims.
Even if we can’t predict h ow t he violence will boil over, continued
demonization means we can be increasingly sure it will.
At its core, stochastic terrorism exploits one of our strongest
and most complicated emotions: disgust. In my book Flush, I de­­
10 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
Bryn Nelson i s a science writer and author based
in Seattle. He is author of F lush: The Remarkable Science
of an Unlikely Treasure (Grand Central, 2022).
Follow him on Twitter @SeattleBryn
scribe how psychologists have come to view disgust as a kind of
be­­havioral immune system that helps us avoid harm. It has a dark-
er side, however: in excess, it can be weaponized against people.
Propagandists have fomented disgust to dehumanize Jewish
people as vermin; Black people as subhuman apes; Indigenous
people as “savages”; immigrants as “animals” unworthy of pro-
tection; and members of the LGBTQ community as sexual devi-
ants and “predators” who prey on children. That horrifying his-
tory is now repeating itself as political extremists create
dangerous new strains of contempt and hatred.
Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has repeatedly hosted right-wing
activist Christopher Rufo, who has claimed that drag queens par-
ticipating in book readings are trying to “sexualize children.” A
revival of the “groomer” smear against the LGBTQ community
has been implicated in an explosion of threats and attacks across
the country. In response to one of Rufo’s on-air diatribes, Carl-
son explicitly linked drag queens to pedophiles: “Why would any
parent allow their child to be sexualized by an adult man with a
fetish for kids?” Rufo then suggested that parents should push
back and “arm themselves with the literature” supposedly laying
out the child-sexualization agenda. Carlson replied, “Yeah, peo-
ple should definitely arm themselves.”
Some have. Researchers have estimated that transgender peo-
ple are more than fourfold more likely to be victims of violent
crime than their cisgender counterparts. Assailants have threat-
ened to kill drag queens and LGBTQ people, as well as educators,
librarians, parents and lawmakers who support them.
Far-right radio ads in swing states repeated falsehoods about
transgender people and a QAnon warning that the Biden admin-
istration would make it easier for children “to remove breasts
and genitals”—an attempt to evoke disgust. Other ads aimed at
white audiences claimed minorities are the true aggressors and
destroyers of social norms.
What can break this cycle of vilification, threats and violence?
Programs to counter extremism, particularly those that empha-
size early intervention and deradicalization,
have yielded some successes in at-risk com-
munities. An example is a program based in
Boston called Online4Good, which teaches
students to “promote tolerance and accep-
tance” through social media campaigns.
We can refuse to buy into “both-sides”
false equivalence and the normalization of
dangerous rhetoric and extremism. We can
do better at en­­forc­ing laws against hate
speech and incitement to violence. Ultimate-
ly we can disengage with media platforms
that make money by keeping us disgusted,
fearful and forgetful of our own decency—
and shared humanity.
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
Illustration by Brian Stauffer
ADVANCES

Belowground, forests host a dense

mat of tangled roots and fungi.

12 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

D I S PATC H E S FR OM T H E FR O N TIER S O F S C IEN C E , T EC H N O LO GY A N D M ED I C IN E IN S ID E

• Antarctic plankton help to produce

a protective atmospheric shield
• Cells go cyborg with hydrogel armor
• Fish-seeking humans and dolphins team
up for mutual benefit
• Key plant component shifts to act
like a glass

E C O LO G Y

A Tangled
Web
How much do networks of fungi
connect trees?

Filaments of fungi intertwine with the

tips of tree roots to form underground net-
works that seem to benefit both organ-
isms: the filaments, called hyphae, break
down minerals in the soil that trees can
then take into their roots, and the fungi get
a steady supply of sugar from the trees.
Research has hinted that these connec-
tions—known as mycorrhizal networks—
can extend between trees, letting one tree
transfer resources belowground to an­­
other. Some scientists even argue that
trees are cooperating, with older trees
passing resources to seedlings and nurtur-
ing them as a parent might.
This idea of forests as cooperative, car-
ing places has caught on in both scientific
literature and popular culture, notably in
the 2021 book F inding the Mother Tree:
Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by
University of British Columbia forest ecolo-
gist Suzanne Simard. There is even a
wmaster890/Getty Images

punny name for the phenomenon: the

“wood-wide web.”
A new analysis published in Nature Ecol-
ogy & Evolution, h owever, argues that the
evidence for mycorrhizal networks facili-

J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter

© 2023 Scientific American

ADVANCES

tating tree cooperation is not as strong as study co-author Melanie Jones, a plant improves seedling survival. “In the really
the popular story would suggest. It’s not biologist at the University of British Colum- well-controlled experiments, less than
that relationships between trees and fungi bia—so even genetic samples can’t reveal 20 percent show that the seedlings per-
don’t exist, says co-author Justine Karst, whether the bits of fungi collected at two formed better,” Jones says. In the remain-
an ecologist at the University of Alberta. different trees are still actually connected. ing 80 percent, she adds, hyphae-con-
Rather, in many cases, suggestive lines of These limitations raise questions about nected seedlings performed either equiva-
evidence or studies with many caveats how widespread mycorrhizal networks are lently or worse than the ones cut off from
have been taken as more definitive than and how long they last. Researchers have the fungal network.
they really are. “We don’t want to kill any- verified that substances provided to one tree Meanwhile another idea—that trees
one’s joy or curiosity or wonder about the can be taken up by a neighboring tree in the share underground warnings about her-
forest, but we want to tamp down on forest. But it’s not clear that fungi are neces- bivorous insects or other dangers­­—is
some of the misinformation,” Karst says. sarily responsible for this transfer, Jones says. predicated on a single greenhouse study,
Mycorrhizal networks are delicate: dig Resources can also move directly from root the researchers say, in which researchers
up a root, and you’ve destroyed the very to root and through pores in the soil, and it’s connected a Douglas fir and a ponderosa
web of fungi and wood you wanted to study. difficult to experimentally separate those pine only by fungal networks. When scien-
To begin to figure out if a particular fungus pathways without disrupting tree growth. tists exposed the fir to insects, the pine
really connects any two forest trees, scien- The strongest evidence for trees send- also started pumping out defense chemi-
tists can sequence the fungus’s genes; this is ing resources via fungal pathways in a for- cals. The effect disappeared, however,
a lot of work, Karst says. She and her co- est comes from a 2008 study in which when the firs and pines were connected by
authors could find only five such studies mesh allowed fungi, but not roots, to con- both roots and fungi, as happens in the
across two forest types, comprising only nect ponderosa pine seedlings to older wild. “The main message is that this hasn’t
two tree species and three fungi varieties. pines, Karst and Jones say. Dyes applied to been tested in a forest,” Karst says. “When
And fungal networks’ ephemeral nature cuts in older pines showed up in seedlings, you see those pictures of ancient forests,
makes these studies even more complex. suggesting water transfer via fungal hy­­ big trees . . . passing signals to each other—
Fungi can grow as individuals after their phae. But the study authors say evidence it just hasn’t been tested.”
underground connections are split, says is shaky that such water transfer actually The main argument for cooperative for-

ENVIRONMENT

Antarctic
Shield
Phytoplankton in the
Southern Ocean help to
whiten Earth’s clouds
After sunlight completes its eight-minute
journey to Earth, white surfaces such as
clouds send much of it bouncing right back
into space. The whiter and brighter the
cloud, the better it is at reflecting sun­­
light—and at keeping Earth cool. Now,
a study published in Atmospheric Chemistry
and Physics e xamines a surprising part of
this process: how tiny aquatic creatures
known as phytoplankton play a big role in
Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott/Minden Pictures

whitening Earth’s clouds.

Scientists used satellites to monitor the
skies above a large swath of the Southern
Ocean for five years. They found that
clouds forming south of 60 de­­grees lati-
tude—that is, closer to Antarctica—
tended to be significantly whiter than
clouds farther north.
The reason? Minuscule ocean phyto- Clouds over South Georgia Island in the Southern Ocean

14 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

ests is that trees in a healthy forest survive
better than trees in a sickly one. But such
instances of natural selection as a group are
rare in the wild, says Kathryn Flinn, a plant
community ecologist at Baldwin Wallace
University in Ohio, who was not involved in
the new analysis. And in forests, individual
selection favors competition, with trees
vying for resources in a way that would
prevent group benefits. “I find this whole
controversy really interesting because it’s
an example of people wanting to project
their own values onto nature and of them
wanting to see in nature a model for human
behavior,” Flinn says.
Simard, whose forest research has pro­ pro-
vided much of the basis for the assertions
that trees cooperate, responded to ques-ques­
tions with a statement that she stands by
sup­
her research. “Forests provide crucial sup-
eco­
port to life on our planet. Reducing eco-
systems to their individual parts hinders us
from understanding and appreciating the
emergent relationships and behaviors that
make these complex ecological systems
thrive,” she says. “For decades a compart­
compart-
plankton, says University of Utah atmo­
atmo-
spheric scientist Gerald Mace, the study’s
lead author. The Antarctic is “a very highly
productive region” where tiny creatures
such as phytoplankton proliferate more
than they do in seas farther north, he says.
As part of their metabolism, many of these
sunlight­consuming
sunlight-consuming organisms release
a com
com­­pound called dimethyl sulfide, which
rises and reacts with gases in the atmo­
atmo-
sphere to form small aerosol particles—
and, eventually, clouds.
Water vapor typically must first bind
to a “seed” particle to condense into
cloud droplets, says Max Planck Institute
for Chemistry biogeochemist Meinrat
Andreae, who was among the first to
study phytoplankton’s cloud­seeding
cloud-seeding abili­
abili-
ties but was not involved in the new study.
South of 60 degrees latitude, abundant
phytoplankton generate plenty of dimethyl
sulfide seeds—so clouds that form there
are full of tiny water droplets.
In more northern areas, cloud-forming
seeds are less common—“mostly just
salt particles that get swept up from
ocean spray,” says University of Utah
atmos
atmos­pheric
pheric scientist and study co­author
co-author
© 2023 Scientific American
mentalized approach has hindered us from
better understanding why forests help to
regulate global climate and harbor such
rich biodiversity. Applying reductionist
science to complex systems accelerates
the exploitation and degradation of for-
for­
ests worldwide.”
The new study’s authors note that most
of the experiments available are narrow in
focus, and they have already been used to
net­
make big claims about mycorrhizal net-
works. The researchers chose to focus on
the subset of studies conducted in real for-
for­
ests, they add, because those are most rel­
evant to the real world.
rel-
Help Stem
Karst says that she and her colleagues
hope to push research into additional for­
est types and encourage investigation of
for-
The Theocratic
the most promising areas, such as water
transfer between trees. For her part, Karst
thinks mycorrhizal networks may be in in­­­
Tidal Wave
volved in at least some tree­to­tree
tree-to-tree net­
net-
working, and better­designed
better-designed experiments
could get at that truth. “I want to have
another go at it,” she says.
Join the nation’s
— —Stephanie
Stephanie Pappas largest association
of atheists and agnostics
working to keep religion
Sally Benson. The resulting clouds have out of government.
fewer and bigger droplets, providing less
sur
sur­­face area to reflect back sunlight than
southern clouds’ many small droplets,
the researchers say. Join now or get a FREE trial
The study also found that phytoplank­
phytoplank- membership & bonus issues
ton populations, measured by satellite of Freethought Today,
views of the green compound chlorophyll FFRF’s newspaper.
in the water, peak every summer—soon
followed by peaks in cloud reflectiveness.
Mace notes that phytoplankton’s role in
this process is a global phenomenon, but
the effect is clearest in the Southern
Ocean with its plentiful plankton popula­
popula- Call 1-800-335-4021
tion and low level of human influence.
Although phytoplankton’s involvement ffrf.us/science
in cloud whitening has been known for
some time, Andreae says that existing
climate models still lack sufficient data
to fully account for its effects. He adds
that a study of this scale—monitoring a
large ocean region over five years—helps
to illuminate new patterns, such as the
strong link between cloud whiteness and
latitude. “With a study of this size,” he
says, “we can definitely plug better infor­
infor- ffrf.org
mation into our models.”
— —Daniel
Daniel Leonard FFRF is a 501(c)(3) educational charity.
Deductible for income tax purposes.
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 15
ADVANCES
A N I M A L B E H AV I O R
far they’d go.” Indigenous communities “These small animals are so impressive,”

Far-Ranging have described the small foxes traversing

entire continents, Berteaux adds, and widely
says Eva Fuglei, a biologist at the Norwe­
gian Polar Institute, who was not involved

Fox Trot separated fox populations have similar ge­­

Arctic foxes’ transcontinental
trips may spread diseases
Under an around-the-clock s ummer sun,
a young Arctic fox set out in July 2019 from
Bylot Island in Nunavut, Canada. He wan­
dered over the tundra for 299 days, proba­
bly alone, trotting an astonishing 6,400
kilometers before reaching a new home.
A tracking collar confirmed the record-
breaking journey.
“We knew Arctic foxes could go far,” says
University of Quebec ecologist Dominique
Berteaux, who has led an Arctic fox–track­
ing project for 20 years. “But we didn’t know
whether this was a rare be­havior or just how
netics. There are various likely reasons for
such trips: parents often chase juvenile foxes
away from their birth territory to keep com­
petition low, for example, and mature foxes
can be pushed out by stronger individuals.
For a recent study in Royal Society
Open Science, B  erteaux’s team collared
and tracked 170 foxes from 2007 to 2021.
Among them, 37 attempted long-distance
relocation journeys. Berteaux had ex­­pected
the vast majority of migration attempts to
be unsuccessful. Predators, starvation and
other dangers make the treks risky, he says:
“They try to find another spot, but it is diffi­
cult.” Of the 37 long-haulers, however,
13 successfully settled in new territory while
their tracking collars were working.
in the study. “With a satellite tag, we can
follow the footsteps of the Arctic fox. It’s
fascinating to see how fast they walk.”
A surprising 20 percent of the epic trek­
kers were adults, upending assumptions
that only younger foxes could handle such
travel. This insight is especially relevant to
scientists studying “the spreading of zoono­
ses—diseases—which can be very danger­
ous to humans,” Fuglei says.
Previously, researchers had assumed
adult Arctic foxes were unlikely disease
vectors because of less movement. The
new study shows, however, that a signifi­
cant number of hardy older foxes can and
do cross continents, potentially bringing
parasites and illnesses with them.
— Rebecca Dzombak

G r
e
e
n
AA RR C TT II CC l
a
n
d
OO C E AA NN Bylot Island
Study area

by Richard Gravel et al., in Royal Society Open Science; February 1, 2023 (fox dispersal data); National Snow & Ice Data Center (sea ice data)
Source: “Long-Term Satellite Tracking Reveals Patterns of Long-Distance Dispersal in Juvenile and Adult Arctic Foxes (Vulpes lagopus),”
JJU
UVV
A D U LT S EN
II LL
EESS

Typ
ic
al m
Vi
Baffin Island

a x i mu
ct
or
ia
Isl
m se a ic
and
e

C A N A D A
ap Adult Juvenile
nm
M ai e a dispersal dispersal
ar

Fox settled in an area HH uu d s oo nn 0 kilometers 250

Fox died
Tracking failed
B a yy 0 miles 200

The map shows the journeys of 27 adult foxes and 10 juveniles that dispersed over long distances. An additional two young foxes settled less
than 80 kilometers away from their birthplace, and four others died shortly after departing. Eva Fuglei notes that tracking collars let research-
ers see “through the polar night” and document the foxes’ winter behavior, which is much less well understood than spring behavior. They
also revealed that juvenile foxes relied heavily on sea ice for their travels, suggesting that shrinking ice extent will affect future dispersals.

16 Scientific American, May 2023 Map by Daniel P. Huffman

© 2023 Scientific American

 POLLUTION
Microplastics
Alert
A new trick helps satellites track
worsening ocean pollution
Despite their name, microplastics
 icroplastics are
m Unlimited Discoveries.
a gigantic player in pollution worldwide.
These fibers, beads and fragments (de (de­­
fined as being less than five millimeters in
size) have infiltrated nearly every environ­
ment, especially oceans. To track the
problem, researchers are now homing
in on these seaborne flecks from more
than 300 miles away—in space.
Scientific Reports
Recent research in Scientific
details how microplastics appear to flow
details
alongside floating patches of oily and soapy
substances called surfactants, which cre­
ate distinct footprints in ocean currents.
Those footprints are detectable by nasa’s
Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System
hurricane-
(CYGNSS), a network of eight hurricane­
monitoring satellites, and tracking them
could help map microplastics’ spread, aid­
ing cleanup and regulation efforts.
“In general, there are insufficient data
about microplastics concentration in
the ocean,” says University of Michigan
marine engineer and study coauthor Yulin
Pan. Computer models and samples from
trawling nets are helpful but incomplete,
Pan adds: “That is one of the reasons that
we really want a remote sensing tech­
nique, to have a general understanding.”
The CYGNSS satellite radar measures
the ocean surface’s roughness, caused by
wind-generated waves. In 2021 CYGNSS
wind­generated
researchers noticed the radar picking up
peculiar areas of smoothness with fewer
and smaller waves. The scientists realized
these anomalies lined up with the notori­
ous Great Pacific Garbage Patch—and
seemed to correlate with levels of micro­
plastics in the water. These initial findings
were later used to track microplastics’ flow
in other hotspots.
But researchers still didn’t know the
mechanism behind the smoothness or
Wend Images/Alamy Stock Photo
whether it might be linked to factors aside
from microplastics such as marine life,
other debris, or chemical interactions. Iso­
lating microplastics’ influence is “hard if
you don’t have good training data, where
you have microplastics in one part of the
Emboldening
the Mind
Since 1845
Unlimited Knowledge.
Trash in the Pacific Ocean
Scan to learn more
ocean and then you can remove them all
and test it again,” says University of Wash­
ington mechanical engineer Michelle
DiBenedetto, who studies microplastics
fluid dynamics and was not involved in the
new research.
For their study, Pan and his CYGNSS
next-best thing: they
colleagues did the next­best
750,000-gallon indoor wave tank
used a 750,000­gallon
real-world currents. They
to simulate real­world
found that microplastics alone, at their
reported ocean concentration, did not
generate matching patches of smooth­
ness. Instead the smoothing came when
the researchers added surfactants. These
chemicals—which influence wave activity
by decreasing the water’s surface ten­
sion—often accompany microplastics as
a by­product
by-product of plastic production and
breakdown and are carried on the same
ocean currents. Because the satellites eas­
ily spot surfactants’ smoothing effect, the
substances can act as a tracer for micro­
plastics’ movements, the researchers say.
DiBenedetto says tracing surfactants is
a tactic “worth pursuing,” but more infor­
mation is needed on their relationship with
microplastics in a field setting. This sum­
mer the CYGNSS team is coordinating
with National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration research vessels to com­
pare satellite data with water samples
from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
This comparison should further solidify
the correlation between surfactants and
microplastics, Pan says.
Microplastics “can persist for a really
long time,” DiBenedetto says. “If we want
to invest in solutions, we want to know
how plastic naturally moves around so
Scientific American is a registered trademark
that we can most optimize our resources of Springer Nature America, Inc.
and go after the places we can make the
biggest difference.”  Lauren J. Young
—Lauren
—
oneThirdNBTemplate.indd 19 7/25/22 10:26 AM
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 17
© 2023 Scientific American
ADVANCES
S Y N T H E T I C B I O LO G Y
Cyborg Cells
Bacteria with synthetic skeletons
could be used as tiny robots
Scientists have implanted a n artificial
hydrogel scaffold into bacteria to create
semisynthetic “cyborg cells” that could
one day function as tiny robots in medi-
cine, environmental cleanups and indus-
trial production, according to a recent
study in Advanced Science.
In addition to making the cells hardier,
this scaffolding eliminates their ability to
reproduce so they can be controlled better
than genetically modified live bacteria. The
cyborg cells are also easier to create than
fully artificial cells of similar complexity.
“We never thought this would work,”
says synthetic biologist and study co-author
Cheemeng Tan of the University of Califor-
nia, Davis. “When you introduce a gel ma­­
trix into cells, most of the time you would
think you would kill them.” But his team
decided to try.
To build a biological robot, researchers
A S T R O B I O LO G Y
Creatures from
the Brown Lagoon
Microbes from a dry Spanish lake may hold lessons about Mars
As central Spain’s T  irez Lagoon dried up
over 20 years, becoming entirely desic-
cated by 2015, its barren landscape began
to evoke arid Martian plains. That resem-
blance, it turns out, could be useful: re­­
searchers are watching the newly dead
lagoon’s microbial residents to learn what
could have happened to hypothetical life
on Mars when its salty lakes dried up bil-
lions of years ago.
“The take-home message is that if life
existed on Mars when the planet had liquid
water on the surface, the global desiccation
of Mars would have not necessarily implied
that life disappeared for good,” says Alberto
G. Fairén, an astrobiologist at the Spanish
Astrobiology Center in Madrid.
Analyzing microbes in Tirez soil samples
from 2002 and 2021 for a study in Scientific
Reports, F airén and his colleagues found that
single-celled organisms called prokaryotes
18 Scientific American, May 2023
often hack a living
microbe’s genetic code
to adapt the organism to
an intended purpose. But
billions of years of evolution
have taught microbes not to do
things that endanger them—a vex-
ing situation for synthetic biologists who
want cells to produce valuable but toxic
chemicals or to do other hazardous jobs.
“They’re not stupid; they’re not going to
do something that doesn’t make them either
divide better or grow better,” says University
of Minnesota synthetic biologist Kate Ada-
mala, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
“That’s kind of their business model.”
Because fully artificial cells don’t repro-
duce or have survival instincts, they’re easier
to control than live cells. But it’s often hard to
make them sophisticated enough for com-
plicated jobs. “In terms of complexity, they’re
just no match for natural cells,” Tan says.
To make cyborg cells, the researchers
infused live Escherichia coli w ith a hydrogel,
which Tan likens to a dense mass of wet
molecular noodles. This fortification made
the cells sturdier, letting them survive toxic
had adapted to thrive in extremely dry sedi-
ments. These results suggest microbes that
developed in wetter conditions could have
endured after the Red Planet dried out. The
researchers also measured traces of fatty
acids called lipids, which form in cell mem-
branes, in the 2021 samples—and the team
confirmed that these long-lasting molecules
would be a good target in searching for
signs of previous life on other planets.
Astrobiologists often study extreme
Earth environments that could resemble
those of other planets. The Tirez team,
however, says its new study presents the
first long-term “time analog” of environ-
mental changes on another world. Re­­
searchers had been interested in the
lagoon’s high salt concentration as a proxy
for Jupiter’s moon Europa, which some have
hypothesized may hold life. But in 2020 Fai-
rén got the idea to use the decades of
© 2023 Scientific American
stressors that would kill
ordinary E. coli. S
 uch
cells fall somewhere
between artificial and
natural: they can’t divide
but otherwise have normal
function and metabolism. The
team also showed that cyborg cells
can be programmed with genetic “cir-
cuits” (sets of genes that let cells do simple
computations) and equipped with genes
that help them invade tumor cells.
Scientists have incorporated hydrogels
into fully artificial cells before. But hydro-
gel components are “superhard to control”
within a living cell, Adamala notes. Tan
says the group stumbled onto the right
hydrogel basically by accident—and spent
months fine-tuning the recipe so bacteria
could survive it.
Tan and Adamala agree that turning
other cell types into cyborgs could be use-
ful; yeast, for instance, is a fungus that can
make proteins bacteria can’t. For now Tan’s
team is working on programming cyborg
bacteria to deliver vaccines and act as tiny
terminators for cancer cells.  —Elise Cutts
lagoon data to learn about early lakes on
Mars instead.
As this type of study helps researchers
understand faraway worlds, it can also be
useful closer to home. Time analogs raise
“an interesting idea—that not only should
we explore more for understanding Mars
but also our own planet,” says Nathalie
Cabrol, chief scientist at the SETI Institute,
which focuses on the search for extraterres-
trial intelligence. Cabrol, who was not in­­
volved in the study, says there is a “dire need”
for research on how fast Earth’s biospheres
are morphing because of climate change.
Fairén’s team is currently planning two
new time-analog studies. First, if Spain’s
long dry spell ends, Fairén hopes to mea-
sure how Tirez’s microbes respond to water
reentering the lagoon. Second, he wants to
study ecological change in polar environ-
ments where ice is melting at increasing
rates to compare it with the period when
Mars lost its surface ice. He’s convinced
such research will inspire other scientists to
take advantage of changing environments
for their own studies—learning more about
life both on Earth and beyond.
— Allison Gasparini
Illustrations by Thomas Fuchs
 A dolphin and a fisher in Laguna, Brazil
A N I M A L- H U M A N C O O P E R AT I O N
Swim Team
A famed dolphin-human
partnership brings mutual benefits
People in Laguna p proudly
roudly refer to their
southern Brazilian city as the “national capi-
tal of fish-herding dolphins.” For at least 140
years artisanal fishers and bottlenose dol-
phins have worked together in careful syn-
chrony to catch mullet in a local lagoon.
The spectacle of nets flying through the air
while dolphins dive into the murky water
has become a popular attraction for tour-
ists, and it is recognized by local authorities
as an intangible cultural heritage.
In 1998 scientists confirmed that this re-
nowned example of human-wildlife cooper-
ation aids at least one of the parties: the
fishers, who enjoy larger catches when they
join forces with dolphins. Most believed that
the dolphins were reaping rewards, too, but
this hypothesis was more difficult to test.
Now researchers have finally docu-
mented that the benefits are indeed mutu-
al. An exhaustive new study published in
the P roceedings of the National Academy of
Proceedings
Sciences USA sshows
hows that dolphins that team
up with fishers gain more food and have an
edge in survival compared with those hunt-
ing without human partners.
Laguna’s resident population of up to 60
Angelo Gandolfi/Minden Pictures
dolphins uses echolocation to find schools of
mullet that humans are unable to detect in
the opaque water. Then the cetaceans herd
a school toward the fishers, who are typical-
ly standing in the shallows just offshore. The
dolphins give a cue, such as a sudden deep
Science in
Your Inbox
Sign up for
our free daily
newsletter
dive, to let the fishers know when to cast Scan to learn more
their nets; the net casting in turn breaks up
the school of speedy fish, making it easier
for dolphins to capture individual mullet.
“Each [species] brings a new skill to the
table that increases their mutual success,”
says Mauricio Cantor, the study’s lead au-
thor and a behavioral ecologist at Oregon
State University. The research indicates,
however, that these celebrated interspecies
hunts are in danger of vanishing. “Our data
suggest this interaction is becoming rarer
over time,” Cantor says. “If things continue
the way they are, these interactions might
disappear in the next 50 to 60 years.”
Laguna’s cooperative fishers and dol-
phins are one of the few remaining exam-
ples of a millennia-old tradition across the
world. Fossil evidence from Europe indi-
cates that humans and wolves might have
collaborated to hunt prey as early as 32,000
years ago. In the first century c.e. Pliny the
Elder mentioned fishers working with dol-
phins in what is now southern France. Since
then, seemingly cooperative interactions
with people have been recorded in at least
16 species—mostly cetaceans but also
some birds—in countries such as Australia,
Myanmar, Mauritania and Japan.
Many such collaborations have ended,
however. And those left are almost all in de-
cline because of pollution, overfishing and
habitat loss, combined with the general dis-
connection of humans from the natural envi-
ronment. “Today most interactions we have
with wildlife tend to be antagonistic and not
Scientific American is a registered trademark
mutually beneficial,” Cantor says. “So it’s of Springer Nature America, Inc.
really important to understand how these
Continuedon
Continued
Continued onpage
page 20
oneThirdNBTemplate.indd 18 9/6/22 1:01 PM
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 19
© 2023 Scientific American
ADVANCES
 ontinued from page 19
C gal drift nets that drown dolphins as bycatch.
things happen and what we can do to safe-
guard this unique biological phenomenon.”
To analyze Laguna’s human-dolphin co-
operation, Cantor and his colleagues collect-
ed data using drones, underwater micro-
phones, sonar cameras, GPS and interviews
with fishers. The study’s senior author, Fábio
Daura-Jorge of the Federal University of
Santa Catarina in Brazil, also provided 15
years’ worth of survey responses from fish-
ers, as well as photographs and dolphin be-
havior records for both individual animals
and groups.
After pulling it all together, the research-
ers found that fishers were 17 times more
likely to catch mullet when they worked with
dolphins than they were on their own, and
dolphins had more success in these partner-
ships as well (the researchers are still work-
ing to quantify the dolphins’ gains). Dolphins
that partnered with fishers also experienced
a 13 percent boost in survival, most likely be-
cause they spent most of their time in the la-
goon. In areas nearby, some fishers use ille-
TECH
Bionic Finger
A fingerlike device pokes objects
to sense their internal structures
Human fingers d  on’t just sense what a
surface feels like. They also tell us a lot
about what’s underneath it: a really firm
handshake, for example, can
reveal where some bones
are, and, with enough
prodding, one can even
locate tendons.
Inspired by this
capability, scientists
have developed a fin-
gerlike device that
maps an object’s inter-
nal structures in 3-D by
touching its surface. Earlier
tactile sensors detected exter-
nal shape, stiffness and texture but
not subsurface details. For a study in Cell
Reports Physical Science, t he researchers
tested their device by scanning simulated
human tissue and electronic circuitry.
“This bionic finger has exciting applica-
tion prospects in material characterization
20 Scientific American, May 2023
These findings support “the long-stand-
ing hypothesis that these dolphins experi-
ence a higher prey capture rate when inter-
acting with fishers,” says University of Cape
Town behaviorial ecologist Jessica van der
Wal, who was not involved in the research.
The team also built a model to predict
how fisher-dolphin interactions might
change over time. Fishers have anecdotally
reported a decline in joint hunting practices
over the past 15 years, and the model sug-
gests that this trend will continue, putting
the practice in danger of extinction. The
main drivers for that decline, the authors
found, are decreasing mullet populations
caused by overfishing and climate change,
along with livelihood changes in the arti-
sanal fishing community.
The scientists propose some solutions to
help prevent this loss: Fishers, for example,
could be incentivized to keep working with
dolphins if buyers of their catch were willing
to pay a premium for their fish. This way,
Cantor says, “even if catch declines over
and biomedical engineering,” says study co-
author Zhiming Chen, an engineer at Chi-
na’s Wuyi University. “The technology could
also be incorporated into robots and pros-
thetics, which is our next research topic.”
The new “finger” contains a carbon fiber
tactile sensor, which returns a stronger
signal when compressed against stiffer
objects. The device moves across an
object’s surface, poking several times at
each location to feel for increas-
ing levels of pressure. This
process can reveal subsur-
face details, such as hard
layers inside softer ma­­
terials. “When pressed
by this bionic finger,
hard objects retain
their shape, whereas
soft objects deform
when sufficient pressure
is applied,” says Wuyi engi-
neer Jian Yi Luo, the study’s
senior author. “This information is
transmitted to a computer, along with the
recorded position, and displayed in real
time as a 3-D image.”
Other imaging methods, including
x-ray, PET, MRI and ultrasound, have their
own pros and cons. X-rays carry health
© 2023 Scientific American
time, there will be a higher reward for fish-
ers in monetary terms.”
Protecting dolphins from becoming by-
catch would also help. The government
could invest in more policing to remove ille-
gal nets and apprehend violators. And rais-
ing awareness is key. “Getting people excit-
ed about these rare phenomena is a way to
add more value to these kinds of cultural
practices that seem to be fading away,”
Cantor says. “Preserving cultural diversity
has been shown to promote the preserva-
tion of biological diversity as well.”
The “exemplary” new study is “of huge
importance” for showing both how this
cooperation is achieved and how it can be
conserved, says University of Bristol be-
havioral biologist Stephanie King, who was
not involved in the research. “Humans are
renowned for the ways they cooperate,”
she says, “but what is even more remark-
able is two distantly related species with
very different evolutionary histories acting
cooperatively to achieve a common goal.”
— Rachel Nuwer
risks, and other options lack portability
or speed. Many are expensive. The new
device is unlikely to be significantly cheaper
than ultrasound, but it may provide better
resolution. “It offers another way of doing
things, which has its own advantages in
specific contexts,” says University College
London engineer Sriram Subramanian,
who was not involved in the work. “I don’t
think it’s easy to do ultrasound imaging of
printed electronic circuits.”
In simulated human tissue, the device
pinpointed bones and a blood vessel. For a
flexible electronic circuit encapsulated in
soft material, it detected a circuit break and
an incorrectly drilled hole. “When we make
those [devices], we always worry that if
something is broken, the only way you can
know is to take it apart,” Subramanian says.
The device will struggle to map objects
whose outer surface is too hard, and it may
miss details underneath hard layers. The
researchers plan to extend their invention
into more dimensions, however, perhaps
probing from other directions as well.
“This system might be expanded to multi-
ple fingers, just like our hands, to realize
‘omnidirectional’ detection,” Chen says.
“This would enable it to get more complete
information.”  —Simon Makin
 C O N S E R VAT I O N
Bird Barrier
Deterrent film halts bird strikes
only on windows’ outdoor sides
Hundreds of millions o  f birds die every
year from smashing into windows, one of
the biggest sources of human-caused bird
deaths—far greater than wind turbines and
airplane strikes combined. In a bid to help
birds see the panes before it’s too late, peo-
ple may stick decals or tinted films on their
windows—often on the indoor side. But
a recent study in P  eerJ Life & Environment
shows that such films work only on a win-
dow’s outside surface.
“Putting these window films on the
inside really is not giving you the benefit
that you would want for protecting the
birds,” says John P. Swaddle, a biologist at
the College of William and Mary and lead
author of the new study.
To test the films’ effectiveness, Swaddle
and his colleagues applied one of two com-
mercially available films to either interior
or exterior window surfaces. One film re­­
flected shorter light wavelengths that hu­­
mans cannot see, and the other reflected
longer wavelengths (many birds can see
both). The researchers also mounted super-
fine nets in front of the windows to keep
Alan Murphy/BIA/Minden Pictures
birds from actually hitting the glass. Both
films helped to prevent bird strikes by more
than 35 percent when put on the outside
surface, the study found—but films on the
inside had no benefit at all.
“It’s some groundbreaking work about
the nuances of what can and can’t work
in terms of preventing window strikes from
birds,” says George Mason University biolo-
gist David Luther, who studies the evolution
of birds in cities and was not involved in
the study.
People usually find it much easier to put
films or decals on the indoor side of a win-
dow, says Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela, a con-
servation ecologist at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, who was also not
involved in the study. For taller buildings, to
apply something to the outside, “you need
scaffolding . . . you need to clean the win-
dows extra well for them to apply correctly,
and they don’t last as long.”
Swaddle hypothesizes that films placed
on the inside don’t effectively interrupt the
reflection and scatter of exterior light. This
might also be the case with decals, although
those were not tested in this study, he says.
In future studies, the researchers will con-
tinue exploring how birds see and experi-
ence the world, which could further help
bird lovers, architects and manufacturers
prevent avian deaths.  —Susan Cosier
© 2023 Scientific American
N E W S A R O U N D T H E WO R L D
Quick Hits
By Allison Parshall
AUSTRALIA
Male quolls, endangered Australian mar-
supials, die after one mating season—and
new research using radio trackers shows
why. Scientists found the quolls sacrifice
sleep and travel long distances to find a
mate, likely making them weak and reck-
less. One walked 6.5 miles in one night—
equivalent to 24 miles for a human.
FRANCE
Cryptographers decoded 57 hand-
encrypted letters from Mary, Queen
of Scots, who was arrested and later
beheaded as a rival to Queen Elizabeth I.
The 16th-century letters were mostly
addressed to the French ambassador to
England, revealing Mary’s extensive
political efforts while imprisoned.
INDIA
A cave wall discovery originally identi-
fied as a 550-million-year-old fossilized
Dickin­sonia sea creature is actually
residue from a present-day beehive,
researchers say. The finding revives
debate about nearby formations’
geological history.
KENYA
A 2.9-million-year-old tool set used to
butcher hippos is the earliest example of
simple, flaked stone items from what is
called the Oldowan tool kit. The artifacts
may not have human origins, though—
they were excavated alongside teeth from
an extinct hominin branch, P aranthropus.
RAPA NUI (EASTER ISLAND)
A previously unknown moai, one of the
famous volcanic rock statues, was dis-
covered in a lake bed that is drying up as
a result of climate change—and archae-
ologists say there may be more under-
neath the reeds.
U.K.
Ynys Enlli, a tiny Welsh island shielded from
mainland light pollution by a mountain, has
become Europe’s first certified “dark sky
sanctuary.” It has two year-round human
inhabitants and a nesting site for nocturnal
seabirds that need dark skies to fly home.
For more details, visit www.ScientificAmerican.
com/may2023/advances
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 21
ADVANCES
B I O LO G Y
Chloroplast
Choreography
Inside plant cells, chloroplasts
transition to a glass state
to soak up light
Plants are active life-formsdown to their
very cells. Within seconds of light exposure,
some plants’ chloroplasts—the cellular
organs that convert light to energy—will
begin to scramble around and then congeal
again in a flat layer when the light dims.
“They make this mesmerizing, nice
building behavior,” says Nico Schramma,
a physicist at the University of Amsterdam.
In a new study, he and his colleagues found
that chloroplasts, when they cram to­­­gether
against the cell wall in low lighting, actually
become a type of “glass.” The study results
help to explain how chloroplasts can flip-
flop between a rigid solid and a flowing liq-
uid to best soak up the sun.
Glass, to a physicist, is a broad cate-
gory of solid matter. Hard candy can be
Elodea densa u
 nderwater
22 Scientific American, May 2023
glass. Same with plastic—and even
spreadable mayonnaise, by some mea-
sures. Unlike crystalline structures such as
ice, which are solid because of their parti-
cles’ orderliness, the disordered particles
of a liquid transition to glass when they get
jammed together so tightly that they can
barely move.
Schramma’s team found that chloro-
plasts can undergo a similar process. The
physicists tracked chloroplasts in the
aquatic plant Elodea densa in different light
conditions to build a model of their move-
ment, and they soon recognized hallmarks
of a glassy system in the data. The results,
published recently in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences USA, s how
that instead of individual chloroplasts
slowing in low light, they were clustering
and trapping one another.
The findings are “very compelling evi-
dence of a glass transition,” says Lisa Man-
ning, a biological physicist at Syracuse Uni-
versity, who was not involved in the work.
Recognizing this process will let physicists
study chloroplasts’ complex dynamics as a
familiar type of system, the researchers say.
© 2023 Scientific American
The results also reveal hidden parallels
to other glassy living systems. These glass
transitions serve an important purpose:
flexibility. Developing embryos, for exam-
ple, move between fluid and rigid. And
hard tumors spread across the body by
behaving like liquids.
In scarce light, chloroplasts’ glassy
state lets them form a flat layer to soak up
as much light as possible, like a cat in a
patch of sun. But too much light is damag-
ing, so in strong light conditions the chlo-
roplasts weave and dodge to minimize
exposure. “We often think of plants as not
being very dynamic, but at the cellular
level, they’re as dynamic as any other living
thing,” says Roger Hangarter, a plant biol-
ogist at Indiana University Bloomington,
who was not involved in the study.
Hangarter questions whether studies in
E. densa can be generalized to other plants,
whose chloroplasts’ shape, size and move-
ment vary. The authors plan to collaborate
with molecular biologists in future studies
to integrate that level of biological detail
into their physics-inspired models.
— Allison Parshall
Ron Boardman/Minden Pictures
METER Marianne Karplus, a geophysicist and associate professor
at the University of Texas at El Paso, is inspired to write poetry
Edited by Dava Sobel during her scientific field expeditions in the western U.S.,
the Himalaya and Antarctica. Her poems have been published
in several literary magazines.

Confluence
When two rivers meet,
they sometimes hesitate to mix.
The murky sediment load carried by one
keeps its distance from
the clear blue-green of the other.
Each reflects the color
of the landscape it has carved,
sometimes with caution,
and sometimes with turbulence.

Steep canyon walls bear witness

and scars of the steady descent
of water molecules pulled by gravity,
eroding crystals and grains, thirsty clay particles
that tumble and drift in the flow.
The rivers emerge and meander
away from the rugged mountains
and toward each other,
beginning to unburden their loads.

The distinct paths become one,

and the denser stream ducks under,
hiding its sedimentary past
along the line of mixing,
where eddies test the waters.
Clouds and clarity
complement each other,
and, with time,
dispersion and blending
shift the current into balance.

Michael Warren/Getty Images

24 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 Lydia Denworth is an award-winning science journalist and THE SCIENCE
contributing editor for Scientific American. S he is author
of Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power
OF HEALTH
of Life’s Fundamental Bond (W. W. Norton, 2020) and several
other books of popular science.

The “10,000 Steps” meeting the 10,000-step goal. Several other large studies followed.
The result? Some movement is good, and more is better, but the

Gimmick
benefits taper at some point. Your personal peak depends on your
age. People younger than 60 should indeed walk 8,000 to 10,000
steps a day to get the best benefits in terms of life expectancy and
New research points to different daily step cardiovascular health. People older than 60 show the most bene-
goals depending on age and fitness fit between 6,000 and 8,000 steps. (Seven thousand to 9,000 steps
a day is roughly equivalent to 150 to 300 minutes of brisk walk-
By Lydia Denworth ing each week, the target in the 2018 guidelines.)
The difference is energy expenditure. “We basically relate
In 2022 I averaged 9  ,370 steps a day. I know. I counted. Or rather energy expenditure to health outcomes,” Kraus says. Walking for
my iPhone counted. I carried it everywhere—not so much to 60 minutes at 3.3 miles an hour and running for 30 minutes at
catch every call as to catch every step. My daily aim? Ten thou- six miles an hour use the same amount of energy. “The older you
sand steps. Because goals. are, the less efficient you are with your steps,” Kraus says. “Per
Yet the concept of taking 10,000 steps a day to maintain step, older people expend more energy.” As a result, they need
health is rooted not in science but in a marketing gimmick. In fewer steps to achieve the same benefits.
the 1960s a company in Japan invented an early pedometer. Adding a few thousand steps a day can be especially meaning-
Because the Japanese character for “10,000” looks like a person ful for someone who isn’t physically able to walk briskly, says
walking, the company called its device the 10,000-step meter. Amanda Paluch, an epidemiologist at the University of Massachu-
“It was just sort of a catchy phrase,” says I-Min Lee, an epi- setts Amherst, who led two meta-analyses linking step counts with
demiologist at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Wom- risk of death and cardiovascular disease. She concludes that “the
en’s Hospital in Boston. Taking that many steps daily is challeng- people who are the least active have the most to gain.”
ing but doable for many people. “Sure, if you get 10,000 steps, it The total number of steps you take does appear to matter
seems like a good goal. But there was not really any basis to it.” more than the speed at which you take them. “The relevant ques-
Step-counting devices such as watches and phones came into tion for me is, When two people walk the same amount, does it
widespread use only in the past two decades. Once they did, sci- matter whether their steps are accumulated at a faster rate ver-
entists needed to follow users for long periods to learn anything sus a slower rate?” Lee says. The answer so far is no.
meaningful about the number of steps that affects mortality, car- Newer studies are moving beyond death rates to ask questions
diovascular fitness or anything else. And until recently, that about the way steps may contribute to diabetes prevention or help
hadn’t happened. to control blood pressure and weight. The goal, after all, is not just
The current physical activity guidelines from the U.S. Depart- to live longer but to live healthier. Full results are not in yet, so
ment of Health and Human Services, published in 2018, are still Lee’s ad­­vice in the meantime is: “Tailor your steps according to
based on time. Experts reviewed hundreds of studies on exer- what you are trying to achieve and according to who you are.”
cise and health. Nearly all were based on self-
reports of physical activity, a measure that is not
exact. It’s the equivalent of guessing how much
time I spent walking last year.
Because of that room for error, the experts
ended up recommending broad exercise ranges
and not step counts: 150 to 300 minutes of weekly
moderate activity (the equivalent of brisk walking)
or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity (for exam-
ple, jogging) during the same period. A decade of
consistently hitting that goal translates to about
an extra year and a half of life, epidemiological
studies indicate. There simply wasn’t enough evi-
dence to make a similar determination about steps.
“It killed me that we couldn’t,” says William Kraus,
a physician and scientist at Duke University, who
helped to draw up the guidelines. “Step counts are
accessible. People can understand them.”
Now evidence about steps is starting to come
in. In 2019 Lee published one of the first studies
specifically investigating the actual effects of

Illustration by Jay Bendt May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 25

© 2023 Scientific American

Q&A

tric in our approaches. The desire then was

to assess nonhuman intelligence by teach-
ing nonhumans to speak like we do—when
in fact we should have been thinking about
their abilities to engage in complex commu-
nication on their own terms, in their own
embodied way, in their own worldview.
One of the terms used in the book is
the notion of umwelt, which is this idea of
the lived experience of organisms. If we
are attentive to the umwelt o  f another or-
ganism, we wouldn’t expect a honeybee to
speak human language, but we would be-
come very interested in the fascinating
language of honeybees, which is vibration-
al and positional. It’s sensitive to nuances
such as the polarization of sunlight that
we can’t even begin to convey with our
bodies. That is where the science is today.
The field of digital bioacoustics—which is
accelerating exponentially and unveiling

Tech Talks to Animals

fascinating findings about communica-
tion across the tree of life—is now ap-
proaching these animals and asking not
“Can they speak like humans?” but “Can
Portable sensors and artificial intelligence are helping they communicate complex information
researchers begin to talk back to nonhumans to one another? How are they doing so?
By Sophie Bushwick What is significant to them?” I would say
that’s a more biocentric approach, or at
In the 1970s a young gorilla known as Koko drew worldwide attention with her abili- the very least it’s less anthropocentric.
ty to use human sign language. But skeptics maintain that Koko and other animals that Taking a bigger view, I think it’s also im-
“learned” to speak (including chimpanzees and dolphins) could not truly understand portant to acknowledge that listening to
what they were “saying”—and that trying to make other species use human language, nature, “deep listening,” has a long and
in which symbols represent things that may not be physically present, is futile. venerable tradition. It’s an ancient art that
“There’s one set of researchers that’s keen on finding out whether animals can engage is still practiced in an unmediated form.
in symbolic communication and another set that says, ‘That is anthropomorphizing. We There are long-standing Indigenous tradi-
need to understand nonhuman communication on its own terms,’” says Karen Bakker, a tions of deep listening that are deeply at-
professor at the University of British Columbia and a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe In- tuned to nonhuman sounds. So if we com-
stitute for Advanced Study. Now scientists are using improved sensors and artificial- bine digital listening—which is opening up
intelligence technology to observe and decode how a broad range of species, including vast new worlds of nonhuman sound and
plants, already share information with their own methods. This field of “digital bioacous- decoding that sound with artificial intelli-
tics” is the subject of Bakker’s 2022 book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is gence—with deep listening, I believe that
Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Princeton University Press). we are on the brink of two important dis-
Scientific American spoke with Bakker about how technology can help humans coveries. The first is language in nonhu-
communicate with creatures such as bats and honeybees—and how these conversations mans. And that’s a very controversial state-
are forcing us to rethink our relationship with other species. ment, which we can dig into. The second
is: I believe we’re at the brink of interspe-
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.] cies communication.

Can you give us a brief history of
humans attempting to communicate
with animals?
There were numerous attempts in the mid-
20th century to try to teach human lan-
guage to nonhumans, primates such as
Koko. And those efforts were somewhat
controversial. As we look back, one view we
have now (that may not have been so prev-
alent then) is that we were too anthropocen-
What kind of technology is enabling
these breakthroughs?
Digital bioacoustics relies on very small,
portable, lightweight digital recorders,
which are like miniature microphones that

26 Scientific American, May 2023 Illustration by Irene Rinaldi

© 2023 Scientific American


scientists are installing everywhere from
the Arctic to the Amazon. You can put these
microphones on the backs of turtles or
whales. You can put them deep in the ocean
or on the highest mountaintop or attach
them to birds. They can record continuous-
ly, 24/7, in remote places scientists cannot
easily reach, even in the dark, and without
the disruption that comes from introducing
human observers in an ecosystem.
That instrumentation creates a data del-
uge, and that is where artificial intelligence
comes in—because the same natural-lan-
guage-processing algorithms that we are
using to such great effect in tools such as
Google Translate can also be used to detect
patterns in nonhuman communication.
What’s an example of these
communication patterns?
In the bat chapter where I discuss the re-
search of Yossi Yovel of Tel Aviv University,
there’s a particular study in which his team
monitored [nearly two] dozen Egyptian
fruit bats for two and a half months and re-
corded their vocalizations. They then
adapted a voice-recognition program to an-
alyze [15,000 of] the sounds, and the algo-
rithm correlated specific sounds with spe-
cific social interactions captured via vid-
eos—such as when two bats fought over
food. Using this, the researchers were able
to classify the majority of bats’ sounds. That
is how Yovel and other researchers such as
Gerry Carter of the Ohio State University
have been able to determine that bats have
much more complex language than we pre-
viously understood. Bats argue over food;
they distinguish between genders when
they communicate with one another; they
have individual names, or “signature calls.”
Mother bats speak to their babies in an
equivalent of “motherese.” But whereas hu-
man mothers raise the pitch of their voices
when talking to babies, mother bats lower
the pitch—which elicits a babble response
in the babies that learn to “speak” specific
words or referential signals as they grow
up. So bats engage in vocal learning.
That’s a great example of how deep
learning is able to derive these patterns
from this instrumentation, all of these sen-
sors and microphones, and reveal to us
something that we could not access with
the naked human ear. Because most of bat
communication is in the ultrasonic, above
our hearing range, and because bats speak
much faster than we do, we have to slow it
down to listen to it, as well as reduce the
frequency. So we cannot listen like a bat,
but our computers can. The next insight is
that our computers can also speak back to
the bat. The software produces specific pat-
terns and uses those to communicate back
to the bat colony or to the beehive, and that
is what researchers are now doing.
How are researchers talking to bees?
The honeybee research is fascinating. A
researcher named Tim Landgraf of Freie
Universität Berlin studies bee communi-
cation, which, as I mentioned earlier, is vi-
brational and positional. When honeybees
“speak” to one another, it’s their body
movements, as well as the sounds, that
matter. Now computers, and particularly
deep-learning algorithms, are able to fol-
low this because you can use computer vi-
sion, combined with natural-language
processing. They have now perfected
these algorithms to the point where
they’re actually able to track individual
bees, and they’re able to determine what
impact the communication of an individ-
ual might have on another bee. From that
emerges the ability to decode honeybee
language. We found that they have specif-
ic signals. Researchers have given these
signals funny names. Bees toot; they
quack. There’s a “hush” or “stop” signal, a
whooping “danger” signal. They’ve got
piping [signals related to swarming] and
begging and shaking signals, and those all
direct collective and individual behavior.
The next step for Landgraf was to en-
code this information into a robot that he
called RoboBee. Eventually, after seven or
eight prototypes, he came up with a “bee”
that could enter the hive, and it would es-
sentially emit commands that the honey-
bees would obey. So Landgraf’s honeybee
robot can tell the other bees to stop, and
they do. It can also do something more
complicated, which is the very famous wag-
gle dance—it’s the communication pattern
they use to convey the location of a nectar
source to other honeybees. This is a very
easy experiment to run, in a way, because
© 2023 Scientific American
Sophie Bushwick is an associate
editor covering technology
at S cientific American.
you put a nectar source in a place where no
honeybees from the hive have visited. You
then instruct the robot to tell the honey-
bees where the nectar source is, and then
you check whether the bees fly there suc-
cessfully. And indeed, they do. This result
happened only once, and scientists are not
sure why it worked or how to replicate it.
But it is still an astounding result.
This raises a lot of philosophical and
ethical questions. You could imagine such
a system being used to protect honeybees—
you could tell honeybees to fly to safe nec-
tar sources and not polluted ones that had,
let’s say, high levels of pesticides. You could
also imagine this could be a tool to domes-
ticate a previously wild species that we
have only imperfectly domesticated or to
attempt to control the behavior of other
wild species. The insights about the level
of sophistication and the degree of com-
plex communication in nonhumans raise
some very important philosophical ques-
tions about the uniqueness of language as
a human capacity.
What impact is this technology
having on our understanding
of the natural world?
The invention of digital bioacoustics is
analogous to the invention of the micro-
scope. When Dutch scientist Antonie van
Leeuwenhoek started looking through his
microscopes, he discovered the microbial
world, and that laid the foundation for
countless future breakthroughs. So the mi-
croscope enabled humans to see anew with
both our eyes and our imaginations. The
analogy here is that digital bioacoustics,
combined with artificial intelligence, is like
a planetary-scale hearing aid that enables
us to listen anew with both our prostheti-
cally enhanced ears and our imagination.
This is slowly opening our minds not only
to the wonderful sounds that nonhumans
make but to a fundamental set of questions
about the so-called divide between humans
and nonhumans, our relationship to other
species. It’s also opening up new ways to
think about conservation and our relation-
ship to the planet. It’s pretty profound.
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 27
THE EUROPA CLIPPER mission
will investigate a mysterious
Jovian moon with a buried sea
under its icy crust.

28 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 SPECIAL REPORT

THE MANY WORLDS OF

JUPITER New missions will explore

potentially habitable oceans
on enigmatic moons around
our solar system’s largest planet
Illustration by Señor Salme

May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 29

© 2023 Scientific American

P L A N E TA R Y S C I E N C E

MISSIONS
TO THE
MOONS
A new European spacecraft is the first
of two probes that will hunt for signs of
habitability on Jupiter’s icy satellites
By Jonathan O’Callaghan

30 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 THE MOONS I o
and Europa are visible
off to the right in this
photograph from
the Juno mission.

May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 31

© 2023 Scientific American

 Jonathan O’Callaghan is a freelance journalist
covering commercial spaceflight, space exploration
and astrophysics.

I
f there is life elsewhere in our solar system, Jupiter’s large icy moons are a pretty good
bet on where to find it.
Scientists believe vast oceans lurk within them, kept liquid by the jostling from Jupiter’s
immense gravitational field and protected from the planet’s harsh radiation belts by thick
ice sheets. “What we’ve learned on Earth is where you find water, you quite often find life,”
says Mark Fox-Powell of the Open University in England. “When we look out in the solar
system, places that have [liquid] water in the present day are really restricted to Earth and
the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.” That last planet and its satellites, studied in detail by nasa
and the European Space Agency’s Cassini-Huygens mission from 2004 to 2017, still hold secrets
that scientists will one day probe. For now all eyes are on Jupiter.
A new mission to visit our solar system’s largest planet and in- tually became Europa Clipper, after the “clipper” merchant ships
vestigate the habitability of its moons is now set to begin. ESA’s of the 19th century. The international collaboration was reborn,
JUICE—the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer—was shipped to French mostly. “It’s much reduced,” Prockter says, although she estimates
Guiana in South America for its April launch on a European Ari- about 70 percent of the originally planned joint science will still be
ane 5 rocket. The six-ton JUICE spacecraft will take eight years to possible. With these two missions, our knowledge of Jupiter and
reach Jupiter, saving fuel along the way by using gravitational as- its moons is set to increase substantially. The spacecraft will tell us
sists from Earth, Venus and Mars. On its arrival in July 2031 the whether life could exist in some of these worlds’ bewildering sub-
solar-powered machine will focus its 10 science instruments on surface oceans, laying the groundwork for later missions to look
three of the four largest Jovian moons—Europa, Ganymede and directly for evidence of such life, possibly even by diving into the
Callisto—all thought to harbor subsurface oceans. Ganymede, the oceans themselves. We can’t yet travel to alien worlds around oth-
solar system’s largest moon, will receive most of JUICE’s attention. er stars, but Jupiter might offer the next best thing.
After its initial reconnaissance, the spacecraft will enter orbit there

Preceding pages: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS (image data); Andrea Luck © CC BY 3.0 Unported

in 2034. “We’re trying to characterize what the habitability of Gan-
ymede might be,” says Emma Bunce of the University of Leicester
in England, part of the JUICE team.
ESA isn’t the only space agency with Jupiter in its sights. The
concept that would ultimately become JUICE emerged in 2008 as
part of the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM), a joint venture
THE FIRST MOONS
The Jovian arena is often regarded as a miniature solar system
because of the complexity and variety of the planet’s moons—par-
ticularly its four largest, the Galilean moons, named for Italian
astronomer Galileo Galilei, who discovered them in 1610. Their
identification shook people’s understanding of the universe, re- (https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA25014) (image processing)

with nasa. This collaborative effort called for Europe to build a
Ganymede-focused spacecraft, while nasa would construct a probe
for Europa. Funding issues in the U.S., however, led nasa to pull
the plug on EJSM in the early 2010s, leaving Europe flying solo.
“We didn’t have the money,” says Louise Prockter of the Johns
Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, part of the U.S.
proposal team. “That killed the Europa part.” The situation was
disappointing but not wholly unexpected. “These things happen,”
says Michele Dougherty of Imperial College London, who worked
on the European side of EJSM.
Redemption came in 2013, when nasa’s efforts to explore Euro-
pa received renewed support and funding from Congress. Initially
named the Europa Multiple Flyby Mission, the U.S. project even-
vealing the first known objects orbiting a body that was not the
sun or Earth and thereby validating the Copernican model of the
cosmos, which did not have us at its center. Jupiter is now known
to have 92 natural satellites. Yet even Galileo might not have ap-
preciated how fascinating his moons would turn out to be 400
years later or how pivotal they might prove in the hunt for life else-
where in the universe.
The first spacecraft to venture into Jupiter’s realm, moons and
all, was nasa’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft. It flew past the planet in De-
cember 1973, providing our first close-up images of the magnifi-
cent gas giant. The flyby of nasa’s Voyager 1 spacecraft in March
1979 proved even more remarkable. The spacecraft’s images of the
moon Europa revealed that it had a bright, icy surface devoid of

32 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 craters, hinting that some kind of resurfacing process was keep- THE SHADOW of the moon Ganymede hangs over Jupiter in this
ing its crust fresh and unblemished. The best bet was an unseen image from Juno, with color enhancement by a citizen scientist.
reservoir of liquid water below the surface, scientists surmised—
an enticing option given that on Earth, life follows water. will allow the spacecraft to reach Jupiter more than a year before
In December 1995 nasa’s Galileo mission became the first to or- JUICE, in April 2030. It will not orbit Europa like JUICE will Gan-
bit Jupiter, making numerous discoveries—for example, that the ymede, because Europa’s proximity to Jupiter places it perilous-
planet’s third-largest moon, Io, is the most volcanically active world ly deep within the planet’s radiation belts. Instead Clipper will
in the solar system. Data that Galileo took at Europa in 1996 found perform about 50 Europa flybys as it zips around the Jovian sys-
that something was disrupting Jupiter’s magnetic field, offering tem, allowing it to map the moon’s interior and work out the ex-
stronger hints of a liquid sloshing under Europa’s surface. The best tent of its subsurface ocean while also studying other targets.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS (image data); Thomas Thomopoulos © CC BY 3.0 Unported

evidence for a liquid ocean on Europa came two decades later, “Putting an orbiter around Europa, because of the radiation en-
when the Hubble Space Telescope spotted plumes of water escap- vironment, means you’re only going to survive one to three
ing from the moon’s surface. The Galileo spacecraft orbited Jupi- months before the radiation kills you,” says Curt Niebur, Europa
(https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA25015) (image processing)

ter for eight years, ending in 2003, and was “a fantastic mission,” Clipper program scientist at nasa Headquarters in Washington,
says Olivier Witasse of ESA, the project scientist for JUICE. “We D.C. “We realized instead we could fly by, collect our data and get
are really going on the shoulders of Galileo.” the heck out of town where the radiation is lower. That way we
No other probe would orbit Jupiter until the arrival of nasa’s can last years, not months.”
Juno spacecraft in 2016. Juno is still operational today, but it is fo- During their overlapping missions, JUICE and Clipper will per-
cused on Jupiter itself, swinging past it in a looping orbit to probe form an intricate tango as they hop between Jupiter’s attractions,
the planet’s interior, image its violent storms and monitor its im- with copious opportunities for collaboration. “To have two space-
mense magnetic field. The spacecraft has taken some images of Ju- craft in the same system will be really fantastic,” Witasse says.
piter’s moons, but it’ll take dedicated missions to really expose About 20 scientists from both missions are meeting virtually every
their secrets. And that’s where JUICE and Clipper come in. week as part of the JUICE-Clipper Steering Committee, with the
group formulating ideas for how the two spacecraft might sync up
MOON HOPPING AND PLUME SPOTTING at Jupiter. “We’re busy talking through the science opportunities
Clipper will launch in fall 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rock- and coming up with a plan” to present to nasa and ESA, says Bunce,
et. Despite its later launch date, its more powerful launch vehicle who co-chairs the committee with Prockter. Whereas “some of the

May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 33

© 2023 Scientific American

IN 2021 JUNO m  ade a close
flyby of Ganymede, the solar
system’s largest moon.

34 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 details are a little bit different” from the initial EJSM collabora-
tion, Bunce says, the overall dream remains alive. “The original
plan was one mission focused on Ganymede and another mission
focused on Europa,” she says. “And that’s what we’ve got.”
One possibility is that each spacecraft could act as a spotter for
the other. JUICE, for example, could keep an eye on Europa from
afar as Clipper prepares to swoop past—a valuable partnership, es-
pecially if there are indeed plumes of liquid water spouting from
cracks in the overlying ice. Peering into these plumes could lead to
studying oceanic ejecta that are just “minutes old,” Fox-Powell says.
“It really gives us an opportunity to study something that’s pristine.”
As Clipper approaches Europa, JUICE could look for plumes erupt-
ing from the surface, allowing Clipper to train its eye in that direc-
tion. “If JUICE spotted one, that could tell us where to look,” Prock-
ter says. Clipper may even fortuitously pass through some plumes,
allowing it to directly sample them and look for signs of complex
molecules that might hint at signs of life in the Europan ocean.
JUICE will perform two Europa flybys of its own prior to orbit-
ing Ganymede. The one in July 2032 will be just four hours apart
from a Clipper flyby. “We can make similar measurements at the
same time,” Witasse says. That could allow some exciting science
to be done, although the exact details have yet to be determined.
“We won’t fly over the same location, but it will for sure be very in-
teresting,” he adds. “We could image similar surface features, or if
there is a plume, we can observe it from different geometries.”
The joint emphasis on Europa is partially based on scientists’
suspicions that the moon’s liquid-water ocean is in direct contact
with a rocky core. There hydrothermal vents—openings in the sea-
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS (i mage data) ; Kalleheikki Kannisto © CC BY 3.0 Unported (https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA25028) (i mage processing)

floor where heat from deeper within can escape—could supply suf-
ficient energy and nutrients to sustain life. “On Earth we have hy-
drothermal vents where there are whole communities of organ-
isms,” Fox-Powell says. “We have good reason to believe that similar
kinds of chemical reactions are going on at Europa.” Ganymede’s
much larger bulk, however, means that higher-density ice may have
sunk to the bottom of its ocean, forming a vent-blocking barrier.
“It could seal the rocky core away,” Fox-Powell says. “Europa is not
big enough to have that amount of gravity and pressure, so that
high-pressure ice doesn’t form.”

TWO MISSIONS, ONE VISION

None of this rules out G  anymede’s chances of habitability,
nor does it diminish that moon’s scientific interest. After enter-
ing orbit around Ganymede in December 2034, JUICE will sur-
vey the entire surface, study the moon’s magnetic field and at-
tempt to map its aquatic inner layers. For an environment to be
interesting for potential habitability, it needs “a heat source,
liquid water, organic material and stability,” Dougherty says.
“At [Saturn’s moon] Enceladus we know we’ve got three. At Eu-
ropa we’ve got three. And at Ganymede we’re trying to find out.”
Although it will start in a high orbit 5,000 kilometers above
Ganymede, during a nine-month period JUICE will lower its al-
titude to just 200 kilometers over the moon’s surface. Eventual-
ly, at the mission’s end in 2035, the spacecraft will be deliber-
ately crashed into the surface to minimize the chance of any de-
bris contaminating Europa. Ganymede is not thought to have
plume activity, but if it does or if its ice crust is found to be par-
ticularly thin, this finale may have to be rethought so as not to
contaminate Ganymede’s liquid ocean, too. “If there is some-
thing that indicates a connection with the inner ocean and the

May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 35

© 2023 Scientific American

CRACKS AND RIDGES crisscross the surface of Europa in an
image assembled from data taken by the Galileo spacecraft.
outer surface, we may need to change our orbit,” says Giuseppe
Sarri of ESA, project manager for JUICE.
Clipper will provide a similar level of knowledge about Europa
and its ocean. It is not designed to find definitive evidence of life,
however; at best, it will perhaps see the ingredients of life within
the moon’s plumes. Life detection may come on a later mission,
such as nasa’s much sought-after Europa Lander. A concept for the
mission was drawn up years ago by scientists and engineers at na-
sa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, but it awaits further
funding. “Europa Lander has not been in the president’s budget or
the budget passed by Congress for a while,” Niebur says. A road
map for U.S. interplanetary exploration produced by the U.S. Na-
tional Academies in late 2021, meanwhile, placed a Europa Land-
er mission as a lower priority for nasa than other projects.
For now the work is archived, ready and waiting to be reborn.
“I’m confident that what Europa Clipper will learn will make us
want to go back, and a lander of some kind is the logical next step,”
Niebur says. “But maybe Clipper will throw us a curveball, and a
lander is not the right way to go. Maybe we’ll want to hover in the
plumes instead of landing.”
If scientists do want to take a dip in this alien ocean, breaking
through the kilometers-thick ice poses its own challenges. One
possibility is that a lander could include a heat probe to melt its
way through the frozen crust. Last year Paula do Vale Pereira, now
at the Florida Institute of Technology, led an experiment to see
36 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
how long that might take, using a two-meter-high column of cryo-
genic ice called the Europa Tower to simulate the Europan surface.
Presenting her work at the 241st meeting of the American Astro-
nomical Society in Seattle in early January 2023, she found the
task might take anywhere between three and 13 years—long times
to wait, even for multidecadal missions to the outer solar system.
Besides the ticking of the clock, other obstacles abound. “Fig-
uring out a way to have cables transfer power and information
between the lander and the probe is a big, big problem that needs
to be solved in the coming years,” do Vale Pereira says. The land-
er would have to carry perhaps several kilometers’ worth of cable
with it, and the cable would have to be resilient enough to endure
water refreezing as ice around it during the probe’s descent. The
scientific value in solving such problems, however, is tremendous,
not least the prospect of placing some kind of machine directly
inside an alien ocean.
Such dreams are many years away. Any hope of making them
a reality hinges on voyaging to Jupiter and confirming its icy
moons are the attractive targets we believe them to be. Beginning
with JUICE in April and Clipper next year, we are set to solve some
of the most intriguing questions about Jupiter’s moons that have
long gone unanswered. The Galileo spacecraft “revealed to us that
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute
it’s worth going back,” Niebur says. Now we’re doing so with not
one but two spacecraft—a transatlantic partnership to significant-
ly advance the search for habitability around our sun. There is no
world in our solar system quite like Earth, but perhaps places like
Europa and even Ganymede are a close second. If life can survive
here, who knows where else it might thrive?

P L A N E TA R Y S C I E N C E
ALIEN
OCEANS
Six moons of the outer solar system may hold
vast amounts of liquid water and, with it, life
By Rebecca Boyle
Graphics by 5W Infographic
I
n 2005 the Cassini spacecraft visiting Saturn flew through
something engineers didn’t expect—a fine water mist,
spraying into space at 1,290 kilometers per hour through
cracks in the surface of Saturn’s tiny, ice-covered moon
Enceladus. Cassini wasn’t designed to sample the water,
but the discovery inspired scientists to develop new mis-
sions to the outer solar system’s icy moons. At least six of
those worlds—two orbiting Saturn, three orbiting Jupiter and
one by Neptune—might host watery oceans, sandwiched between
a warm planetary core below and ice crust above.
On Earth, water is required for life “as we know it.” Other
than the dunes of Mars, where we have searched for half a cen-
tury, astrobiologists now consider the icy moons of the outer plan-
ets some of the best places to look for life in our solar system.
The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, nick-
named JUICE, was scheduled to launch in April toward the gas
giant and its moons Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. JUICE and
nasa’s Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter and Europa, set to launch
in 2024, will change our understanding of the outer solar system.
The icy moons may rewrite our cosmic perspective, just as they did
when astronomers discovered them in the 17th century.
“The outer solar system is probably replete with moons that
could have liquid water oceans on them, and a subset could have
geothermal and water-rock interactions on the bottom,” says
Chris German, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceano-
graphic Institution, who is co-leading a nasa-funded initiative
called Network for Ocean Worlds (NOW). Why do those charac-
teristics matter? “Everywhere that has those on our planet gets
colonized by microbial life,” German says.
Life could flourish in half-frozen slush on Europa and Ence-
ladus, within the subsurface saltwater ocean of Ganymede,
underneath the methane and ethane rivers of Titan, and maybe
in brines in the deepest craters of the dwarf planets Ceres and
© 2023 Scientific American
Rebecca Boyle is an award-winning freelance journalist
in Colorado. Her forthcoming book Our Moon: How Earth’s
Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolu­­
tion, and Made Us Who We Are ( Random House) will explore
Earth’s relationship with its satellite throughout history.
Juan Velasco is founder of the award-winning information
design studio 5W Infographic (www.5wgraphics.com).
He is a former art director of National Geographic a nd the
New York Times.
Pluto. The icy shells of the ocean worlds may even contain pores
filled with liquid water—and perhaps microbes, says Mike
Malaska, an astrobiologist at nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
About two and a half kilometers into Greenland’s ice sheet,
pressure conditions mimic the top of the ice layer on moons like
Europa, and microbe concentrations there are comparable to
those in a spoonful of yogurt. Chemical interactions or geologic
activity could provide energy for these life-forms, much as deep-
sea volcanic vents like those German has discovered provide
energy for extremophiles on Earth. “Pick your scenario for the
origin of life on Earth, and it could have happened on Europa,”
says Steve Vance, an astrobiologist at jpl. Investigators might
readily find organisms by using techniques for studying extreme
life on our own planet.
NOW is led by scientists at Woods Hole, the Southwest
Research Institute, the Desert Research Institute and Stanford
University. It will host its first joint retreat in August, aiming
to bring together astrobiologists and oceanographers in the
search for biological beings. Co-leader Alison Murray, a micro-
bial ecologist at the Desert Research Institute, first considered
life on alien moons while studying a frozen hypersaline Antarc-
tic lake called Lake Vida. She says that having experience in
Earth’s watery environments is essential to understanding those
across the solar system. “We are actually going to go to places
where we think life might be existing today,” Murray says. “Did
life evolve there? Did life g o t here?” To find out, we just need to
take a deeper dive.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
The Galileo Mission. Torrence V. Johnson; December 1995.
s c i e n t if i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a zi n e /s a
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 37
 MOONS OF JUPITER

Europa STRONG
The Galileo spacecraft discovered that Europa might be venting thin plumes of water 160 kilometers EVIDENCE
into space. It also found that Jupiter’s magnetic fields induced a current, indicating salty liquid water OF LIQUID-
SALTWATER
was present within the sphere. Europa is the solar system’s smoothest object, suggesting its surface
SUBSURFACE
is remade by interior processes more frequently than most other worlds besides Earth. OCEAN

POSSIBLE
STRUCTURE*
Iron core

Rocky Blocks of ice may be rafting on top of an ocean slurry. The rocky seafloor may
mantle be covered in high-pressure ice-VII, which forms a cubic crystalline structure,
unlike the hexagonal water ice on Earth. Ice-VII can efficiently transport salts,
so it could support chemical interactions that could energize a web of life.

Plumes of water vapor

Ice crust 10 kilometers (km)

100 km
LIQUID
SUBSURFACE Ocean
OCEAN currents

Potential
hydrothermal vents

exteriors), NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute (Europa surface texture), NASA/JPL/DLR (Calisto exterior)

NASA Visualization Technology Applications and Development (VTAD) (Europa and Ganymede
WHAT WE STILL DON’T KNOW
The Hubble Space Telescope saw fleeting evidence of water plumes
escaping Europa through cracks in its icy shell. The upcoming Europa
Clipper spacecraft has ice-penetrating radar, and its imaging spectro-
OCEAN VOLUME
1.8 2.6 meter could reveal organic molecules, ammonia, high-pressure ices
(billions of km3) Earth Europa and even brine pools deep in the interior.

DISCOVERED DIAMETER Earth’s EXPLORED BY PLANNED MISSIONS

3,130 KM moon
1610 (3,475 km 1970s: Flybys of Pioneer 10, April 2023: European
by Galileo SURFACE TEMPERATURE diameter) Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2 Space Agency’s JUICE
Galilei –225 °F 1996: Galileo 2024: NASA’s Europa Clipper

*Layers are not drawn to scale

38 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

Ganymede POSSIBLE STRONG
STRUCTURE* EVIDENCE
The largest moon in our solar system Ice/rock crust OF LIQUID-
might contain several layers of rock,
SALTWATER
water and exotic high-pressure ices. Ice layers SUBSURFACE
Interactions between rock and OCEAN
water are fundamental to microbial Liquid ocean
diversity on Earth. Ganymede is the layers, more
only known moon with its own saline with
depth
magnetic field, which causes auroras WHAT WE STILL
akin to those on Earth. The auroras Rocky mantle DON’T KNOW
sway when Jupiter’s magnetic field Ganymede is the JUICE
Iron core mission’s primary
fluctuates, partial evidence for
a large saltwater ocean. target. Scientists will
use the spacecraft
to try to determine the
source of the moon’s
37.8 magnetic field and
1.8
OCEAN VOLUME to study details about
(billions of km3) Earth Ganymede its auroras.

DISCOVERED DIAMETER EXPLORED BY PLANNED MISSIONS

1610 5,262 KM Earth’s 1970s: Flybys of Pioneer 10, April 2023: European
moon Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 Space Agency’s JUICE
by Galileo SURFACE TEMPERATURE
Galilei –297 °F TO –171 °F 1996: Galileo 2000: Cassini 2021: Juno

Callisto
POTENTIAL
Callisto is the least dense of Jupiter’s
LIQUID
moons. It has the good fortune of POSSIBLE SUBSURFACE
orbiting 1.8 million kilometers from STRUCTURE*
OCEAN
the planet, beyond Jupiter’s intense Ice crust
radiation belts. Because Jupiter’s
gravitational field is weaker at this Subsurface
distance, Callisto also experiences ocean
less tidal friction than its companion WHAT WE STILL
moons. The moon’s heavily cratered Mixed rock- DON’T KNOW
surface suggests it has not been ice interior
Scientists are split on
geologically active since its formation, whether Callisto hosts
so it might preserve a record of the an underground saltwater
primordial solar system. ocean and how deep it
would be. By using JUICE
to study the moon’s shape
and its gravity field,
OCEAN VOLUME
1.8 4.8 scientists hope to settle
(billions of km3) Earth Callisto this debate.

DISCOVERED DIAMETER EXPLORED BY PLANNED MISSIONS

1610 4,820 KM Earth’s
moon 1970s: Flybys of Pioneer 10, April 2023: European
by Galileo SURFACE TEMPERATURE Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 Space Agency’s JUICE
Galilei –218 °F 1996: Galileo

May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 39

© 2023 Scientific American

 MOONS OF SATURN

Enceladus STRONG
Tiny Enceladus is the most reflective object in the solar system. Plumes of mist emanating from EVIDENCE
OF LIQUID-
the outer shell freeze and fall back to the surface, keeping it snowy white. It is smooth like
SALTWATER
Europa, further evidence that it is geologically active today. Because the mist generates Saturn’s SUBSURFACE
second-outermost band—the E ring—sampling the band is a way to sample Enceladus’s OCEAN
putative ocean and to search for organic molecules, amino acids or other ingredients for life.

POSSIBLE
STRUCTURE*
Rocky, Plumes of ejecta from cracks in Enceladus’s shell feed Saturn’s E ring,
porous core which contains ice and silica grains that form only in interactions between
warm water and rock. Their existence hints at hydrothermal vents under
Enceladus’s ocean, which might be similar to those on Earth’s seafloor.

Plumes of water
vapor and ice

Ice crust
50 km
(thinner at
south pole)

LIQUID
SUBSURFACE
80 km
OCEAN
Organic
compounds
Potential
hydrothermal
vents

(Titan exterior), NASA Visualization Technology Applications and Development (VTAD) (Triton exterior)
NASA/JPL-Caltech (Enceladus exterior), NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Nantes/University of Arizona
Water plumes up to 200 km tall
were detected spewing from the
south polar region

WHAT WE STILL DON’T KNOW

Scientists don’t know the size of Enceladus’s ocean, but the moon may be
OCEAN VOLUME
1.8
0.01 one of the easiest to investigate because spacecraft can detect elements in
(billions of km3) Earth Enceladus its plumes as well as in Saturn’s E ring.

PLANNED MISSIONS
DISCOVERED DIAMETER EXPLORED BY
Earth’s Enceladus Orbilander concept by
1789 504 KM 1980-81: Flybys by Voyager 1
moon Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
by William SURFACE TEMPERATURE and Voyager 2 Laboratory would orbit and then
Herschel –330 °F 2005: Cassini land in search for potential life

*Layers are not drawn to scale

40 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

Titan STRONG
Cassini dropped a lander on Titan, POSSIBLE EVIDENCE
the alien world most like Earth, with STRUCTURE* OF LIQUID
vast plains and canyonlands. It settled Dense SUBSURFACE
on a plain made of ice grains and atmosphere OCEAN
found evidence for great hydrocarbon Outer shell:
lakes. Titan’s dense atmosphere is Water ice
covered in rich
mostly nitrogen, like Earth’s, but hydrocarbon WHAT WE STILL
lacks oxygen. It has abundant liquid sediment DON’T KNOW
methane and ethane, which create One theory for why
Subsurface
the moon’s hazy orange cast. The ocean Titan hosts so much
compounds have a circulation cycle methane—which
High-pressure continually breaks
like water does on Earth that could
ice shell down in sunlight—
support methane-based life.
Hydrous is that methane
silicate core might erupt from
1.8 17.0 (mix of rock cryovolcanoes that
OCEAN VOLUME and ice) ooze chilled water
(billions of km3) Earth Titan instead of molten rock.

DISCOVERED DIAMETER EXPLORED BY PLANNED MISSIONS

1655 5,152 KM Earth’s 1980-81: Flybys by Voyager 1 and 2
moon Mid-2030s: Dragonfly is
by Christiaan SURFACE TEMPERATURE 2005: Cassini-Huygens (Cassini set to launch in 2027 and
Huygens –290 °F flybys and Huygens probe landing) arrive in 2034

MOON OF NEPTUNE

Triton Dark plumes

detected HYPOTHESIZED
The largest Neptunian moon LIQUID
orbits in a retrograde motion and SUBSURFACE
was most likely captured from the POSSIBLE OCEAN
icy Kuiper belt, a distant asteroid STRUCTURE*
ring. The wrenching change in the Frozen
moon’s trajectory probably heated nitrogen WHAT WE STILL
it up, perhaps enough to warm crust DON’T KNOW
a global ocean below the crust. Icy Voyager 2 glimpsed
Seasonal heating from the sun also mantle evidence of geysers and
warms the moon ever so slightly, lavalike flows above
Subsurface Triton’s surface, suggest-
even at 4.5 billion kilometers. ocean ing the presence of an
Core of rock ocean under a geologically
OCEAN VOLUME
1.8
0.03 and metal active, icy crust. A closer
(billions of km3) Earth Triton look would help explain
what is going on.

DISCOVERED DIAMETER EXPLORED BY PLANNED MISSIONS

1846 2,704 KM Earth’s
moon 1989: Flyby by Voyager 2 None planned so far
by William SURFACE TEMPERATURE
Lassell –391 °F

May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 41

© 2023 Scientific American

PLANETARY ART
Citizen scientists blend creativity and research using data
from a dedicated camera on nasa’s Juno probe

JUPITER’S
STORMS
recall Vincent
van Gogh’s
The Starry
Night in
a processed
image.

ADDED COLOR
and effects
highlight
cyclones at
Jupiter’s north-
ern pole.

42 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 AN EXAGGER-
ATED e  levation
model shows,
in a composite
image, what
the moon
Europa might
look like to a
nearby visitor.

A MONTAGE
shows the
changing faces
of Jupiter’s
atmosphere
over time.

Clockwise from top left: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gills;

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS (i mage data), Gerald Eichstädt (i mage processing) ;
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill; NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Abastumani-63

© 2023 Scientific American

SOCIAL SCIENCE

Witch Hunts

Vicious attacks
on women
often accompany
economic
upheavals
By Silvia Federici and
Alice Markham-Cantor

Photographs by
Kholood Eid

44 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 A FAMILY MEMBER holds
a portrait of Iquo Edet Eyo,
who was killed in Nigeria
in October 2022.

© 2023 Scientific American

 Silvia Federici is co-founder of the International Feminist
Collective and professor emerita at Hofstra University.
Her many books include C aliban and the Witch ( 2004) and
Re-Enchanting the World ( 2019).

I
Alice Markham-Cantor is a writer and fact-checker based
in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her book on witch hunts will be published
by Llewellyn in 2024.

t ’s an old story: A woman is accused of witchcraft by someone close to her—

a neighbor, a relative, a rival. Often the original accuser resents or envies the
woman or has a property dispute with her. At first the complaints are just whis-
pers. But then something happens—a child gets sick, or an accident occurs. The
woman’s name is said again, loudly this time, and more people echo it. Then
she is dragged from her house and killed.
This is what happened to Iquo Edet Eyo, a 69-year- terious deaths resulting from a paucity of health care,
old woman from Cross River State in Nigeria. Along inaccessible justice systems that give impunity to
with four others, she was murdered in October 2022, attackers, a triggering disaster—all of these contribute.
allegedly by a group of young men who charged that But as one of us (Federici) has argued in her 2004 book
her witchcraft had caused a recent motorcycle crash. Caliban and the Witch and subsequent publications,
Her family says that suspicions had been dogging her what sustained periods of witch-hunting have in com-
for years, arising from jealousy of her prosperity. It is mon, across time, space and culture, is a backdrop of
also the tale of Martha Carrier, the ancestor of one of social and economic dislocation.
us (Markham-Cantor), who was hanged in Salem, Witch hunts can erupt suddenly, as during the
Mass., in 1692. Of the accusations against her, one of COVID-19 pandemic, when terrified people searched
the most salient was by a neighbor with whom her fam- for scapegoats. But when rates of these assaults have
ily had a property dispute. Carrier became one of 35 stayed high over decades—such as in Europe in the
people executed for witchcraft in the British colonies 16th and 17th centuries and in parts of Asia and Africa
of New England—“crimes” of which some of them still in the past 50 years—subsistence economies were in
have not been exonerated. the process of being replaced by monetary and capital-
The narrative could be set in Germany in 1581, India istic systems.
in 2003, Uganda in 2018 or Papua New Guinea in 2021. During these times the powerful and the wealthy
Every year more than 1,000 people around the world, were privatizing fields, ponds and forests previously
including men and children, are tortured, expelled held as commons, evicting villagers from the natural
from their homes or killed after being charged with resources that had sustained them for centuries. Close-
witchcraft—using magic, usually to cause harm. Far knit communities with relatively self-sufficient econo-
from declining with modernization, as some 20th-cen- mies disintegrated, leaving the newly dispossessed with
tury scholars predicted, witch hunts are holding steady wage work as the only option for survival. This disrup-
in some places and may be happening more often tion of rural society caused bitter conflicts between the
in others. emerging classes of haves and have-nots that in places
Multiple roots entwine to produce a witch hunt. A manifested as witch hunts.
belief in sorcery, a patriarchal society, sudden and mys- As Federici and other scholars have further argued,

46 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

in medieval Europe, as well as in much of the Global
South, women harvested food and medicinal herbs and
had a close relationship with the natural world. Dur-
ing expansions or intensifications of capitalism, many
rural women lost access to land and, along with it, the
economic and social power they had previously
enjoyed. Among the worst affected were older women,
who in the new dispensation were regarded as unpro-
ductive. Lacking social support and believed to have
destructive magical powers, in many places they came
to be targeted as witches. The pattern began six centu-
ries ago with the witch hunts in Europe.
S ILVER RIVER
In the Medieval period, E urope had a feudal system in
which kings granted land to nobles, landlords and
knights in exchange for military assistance in wartime.
Despite often brutal exploitation, peasants could sup-
plement whatever they earned from laboring on land-
lords’ fields with food and other resources harvested,
hunted or fished from commonly held fields, meadows,
ponds and forests. Women enjoyed relative economic
© 2023 Scientific American
independence. Apart from tending crops, women SILVIA FEDERICI
worked as brewers, bakers, butchers, ironsmiths, retail- (left) and
ers, and much more. Between 1300 and 1500 in Frank- Alice Mark­ham-
furt, Germany, for example, women participated in Cantor study
more than 200 professions, with the municipality witch hunts
hiring at least 16 female doctors for its public health- old and new.
care program.
With the conquest of the “New World” in the 16th
century, however, silver from the mines of South and
Central America began pouring into Europe—paradox-
ically deepening the immiseration of the poor. Infla-
tion skyrocketed, and the purchasing power of wages
collapsed, making even the most basic foodstuffs pro-
hibitively expensive. The consequences were especially
disastrous for women. They were primarily responsi-
ble for feeding and caring for their families but could
not travel long distances to look for better-paying jobs.
In the 14th century, for example, women received half
the pay of a man for the same task; two centuries later
they made only a third of the (reduced) male wage—
and that money went to the husband.
Landlords and wealthier peasants had been fenc-
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 47
 ing off communally held fields, forests and meadows
since the 13th century, and this process intensified.
Rents escalated on whatever land was still available to
the poor for farming. In the 1500s, writes historian
E. B. Fryde, enclosure destroyed more than 2,000 rural
communities in England alone. By the end of that cen-
tury a full third of the English population had no
access to land—and thus no ability to grow food nec-
essary for survival.
Entire communities that had survived through cul-
tivation in common fields found themselves facing
mass impoverishment, with two main choices: emi-
grate or become wageworkers. Older women were par-
ticularly affected. Previously, in many feudal estates, a
widow had rights to parts of her husband’s holdings,
as well as the right to glean crops from other fields. The
breakdown of this “manorial” system left many of those
women dependent on charity.
Caught between the collapse of wages and the loss
of land, peasants rioted across Europe. In Germany, the
aristocracy brutally suppressed a peasant rebellion
between 1522 and 1525, murdering some 100,000 peo-
ple. In most of these rebellions, men took the lead, but
some of the protests against enclosures during the reign
of King James I of England were made up only of
women. In 1602, for instance, “Captain” Dorothy Daw-
son led 37 women in an attack on laborers who were
fencing in a village commons in Yorkshire, England.
Historian Yves-Marie Bercé similarly notes that in six
out of the 31 food riots he studied in 17th-century
France, all the protesters were women.
This is the economic ground on which the “Great
Hunt” of witches in Europe took place. Although pop-
48 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
ular imagination regards the trials as outbreaks of mass
delusion or superstition, the fact that they peaked
between the 1580s and the 1630s, a time of massive
upheaval as a capitalist economy emerged, suggests a
different story.
Church leaders had initiated witch hunts in the
late 15th century, in part as a way of policing social
mores. Now the state, which was closely allied with
religious, political and economic elites, took the lead.
In the 16th century rulers across Europe introduced
new laws to make sorcery punishable by death—and
the trials moved from ecclesiastical to secular courts,
such as in duchies and towns. Historian Christina
Larner writes that in Scotland, authorities systemat-
ically incited panic against witches, traveling from vil-
lage to village to instruct people on how to recognize
them and sometimes even bringing along lists of
women to denounce.
Many of those accused as witches were older women
who no longer had a legitimate means of survival. As
INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo (l eft) ; Bettmann/Getty Images (r ight)
listed by historian Keith Thomas, the following were
the crimes of 65-year-old Margaret Harkett, who was
hanged at Tyburn, England, in 1585:
She had picked a basket of peas in a neighbor’s
field without permission. Asked to return them,
she flung them down in anger; since when, no
peas would grow in the field. Later, William
Goodwin’s servants denied her yeast, whereupon
his brewing-stand dried up. She was struck by a
bailiff who had caught her taking wood from his
master’s ground; the bailiff went mad. A neigh-
bor refused her a horse; all his horses died.

Another paid her less for a pair of shoes than she
asked; later he died. A gentleman told his ser-
vants to refuse her buttermilk; after which they
were unable to make butter or cheese.
Not all alleged witches were poor and landless, how-
ever, and sometimes hunts served to dispossess them.
Witch-hunting escalated when local edicts permitted
officials or judges to seize the property of the accused.
And it declined when the laws were modified to pun-
ish witchcraft without such confiscation. Witch find-
ing could also be lucrative. Matthew Hopkins, Eng-
land’s most famous witch-hunter, reportedly made
£1,000 over his career—almost $200,000 today.
Anyone who tried to save a witch, such as a “gos-
sip,” or a female friend, also risked being killed. Women
had organized protests against enclosures with the help
of other women, but conversations among them were
now so stigmatized that “gossip” came to mean frivo-
lous chatter or backbiting. To save their lives, gossips
had to denounce their friends as witches.
Although the hunts targeted only some, the threat
of being accused affected the behavior of most women.
The persecutions contributed to the construction of a
new patriarchal divide that degraded and limited
women, ranking them below men. Over the course of
the witch hunts, craftsmen in Germany pushed women
Classic Image/Alamy Stock Photo
out of guild membership, and even practicing certain
trades, like selling goods in a market, put women at
risk of sorcery accusations. In France, women lost the
right to make their own contracts. And when they mar-
ried, women and all that they owned effectively became
the property of their husbands.
© 2023 Scientific American
WOMEN b  eing
persecuted as
witches feature
in many depic­
tions of pre­
modern Eur­­ope.
A toad exca-
vated from a
woman’s chest
(left) “proves”
that she was a
witch, in a Ger-
man print from
about 1500. The
Duckingstool, by
Charles Stanley
Reinhart, shows
a woman being
tortured by near
drowning (cen-
ter). In 16th-cen-
tury Holland, a
woman is about
to be burned
alive (right).
With a large population of laborers regarded as
essential to prosperity, sexuality came to be rigorously
policed. Those accused of witchcraft were often women
who were believed to have sex outside of marriage or
village healers and midwives, among whose many tasks
was to provide contraceptives or abortifacients. As
industrialization proceeded, many women were
allowed back into the workforce in manufacturing cen-
ters and factories—but their husbands still received
their wages.
In sum, witch-hunting was a systematic campaign
of terror that eliminated the resistance to disposses-
sion that had simmered for decades after the peasant
protests were crushed. The accusations and persecu-
tion died down only in the latter half of the 18th cen-
tury. Historical records indicate that by that time,
roughly 50,000 people had been executed for sorcery.
I N THE COLONIES
The demand for silver and gold among Europe’s elites
also spurred witch hunts in South America, where
repression helped to crush rebellions against coloniza-
tion and round up laborers for the mines. In 1562 in
Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, Spanish authorities tor-
tured some 4,500 people on the charge of worshipping
idols, flogged them in public to terrify the populace,
and enslaved the survivors in mines. When the Taki
Onqoy movement in Peru sought to invoke the power
of h
 uacas, o
 r deities, against Spanish rule, a Catholic
council convened in 1567 decreed extirpation of “witch
doctors,” and a century of persecution followed.
As Indigenous people were being executed for devil
worship in South and Central America, witch trials
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 49
 arrived in the North American colonies. When the
elites of New England wrote Bible-inflected legal codes
in the early 1600s, they included witchcraft as a crime
punishable by death. The first official trial, in 1647 in
Connecticut, was probably influenced by a wave of exe-
cutions in England. By 1725 more than 300 people had
been accused of witchcraft in New England, nearly four
fifths of whom were women.
As in Europe, those persecuted as witches in the col-
onies were commonly poor and marginalized, but
women who transgressed Puritan behavioral norms or
who attained wealth or property were also at risk. Mar-
tha Carrier did both. She became pregnant out of wed-
lock, and after her immediate male relatives died in a
smallpox outbreak, she may have stood to inherit much
of her father’s land. Carrier refused to confess, and in
August 1692 she became one of the 19 people hanged
for witchcraft in Salem.
Across the world, including in other colonies, witch
hunts spiked for diverse local reasons but almost
always in periods of social or economic upheaval. Tanvi
Yadav of the Central University of Rajasthan writes that
in 19th-century British India, when colonial authori-
ties seized the land of upper-caste people, the sufferers
blamed the loss on witchcraft by Dalit, or oppressed,
50 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
women and started a campaign of witch-hunting
against them. Unable to punch up, the recently dispos-
sessed focused on the vulnerable target of the lower-
caste witch.
M ODERN WITCH HUNTS
Like those in premodern Europe, many contemporary
witch hunts can be traced to expansions or intensifica-
tions of capitalism. Across the Global South, govern-
ments and corporations have appropriated fields, for-
ests and rivers for development projects such as high-
ways, hydropower plants and mines, displacing
be­­tween 90 million and 100 million people in the 1990s
alone. The new wave of enclosures increased inequal-
ity; fragmented communities; worsened child and
maternal health; and deepened social, gender and
intergenerational conflicts. The economic decisions
that enriched some people while impoverishing
others were made in distant cities and, for the most
part, in foreign languages, and few people could dis-
cern their origins.
In a detailed analysis of the Gusii region of Kenya,
anthropologist Justus Ogembo, then at Harvard Uni-
versity, held international development policies
responsible for an explosion of witch-hunting in the
1990s. To meet stringent conditions attached to an
International Monetary Fund loan in 1981, Kenya
slashed public spending on education and health
care—just as the AIDS epidemic hit—and removed
price controls on food and other necessities. Witch-
craft accusations surged as people sought to assign
blame for their suffering. Umar Habila Dadem Danfu-
lani, a professor of religious studies at the University
of Jos in Nigeria, similarly indicts the economic
stresses induced by austerity policies, noting that at
that time fear of witchcraft beset some ethnic groups
with no prior history of it. The numbers of homeless
children in cities rose, as did an increase in witchcraft
accusations in the 1990s—especially of children.
Leo Igwe, founder of the Nigeria-based group Advo-
cacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW), which assists victims
of witch hunts, observes that when social welfare pro-
grams are cut, the accusations increase. The less the
presence of the state in people’s lives, he says, “the
more of people scapegoating the disabled, scape­
goating children, scapegoating the elderly, scapegoat-
ing women in trying to make sense of stressful eco-
nomic situations.”
Economic rivalry contributed to an outbreak of
witch-hunting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
© 2023 Scientific American
in 2003. Members of a faction competing for control of ARTWORK
the Mongbwalu gold mines accused women who were in Federici’s
ethnically linked with an opposing group first of spy- apartment
ing, then of witchcraft. Human Rights Watch estimated includes R  eclaim
that as many as 70 women and men were executed in the Commons
the resulting witch hunts. (left), by Erik
Historian and missionary Hugo Hinfelaar similarly Ruin; depic­tions
notes that in Zambia in the 1990s, witchcraft allega- of struggles,
tions were “particularly rife in areas earmarked for among them
game management and game ranching, for tourism, Peasants Revolt,
and for occupation by potential big landowners.” by Rachel
Because of the paucity of reporting, just how many Hewitt, to the
witch hunts derive from such competition over re­­ right (center);
sources is unknown. As Hinfelaar writes, however, and a poster
some chiefs and village headmen profit from selling (right) on the
land used by the community to international investors, Inter­national
“and fomenting social disruption in the villages facili- Wages for
tates such transactions.” A village torn apart by sorcery Housework
allegations, he explains, “will not have the power to campaign,
unite and oppose attempts to having the land they cul- which Federici
tivate being taken over by someone else.” co-founded
As fertile fields available to the marginalized be­­ in 1972.
come scarce, conflict over even a small plot can indi-
rectly precipitate a “witch” killing. In cultures that fear
sorcerers, says Miranda Forsyth, a researcher with Aus-
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 51
A FILING CABI- tralian National University’s Sorcery Accusation Re­­
NET in Federici’s lat­ed Violence Project, “if you are in a land dispute
home contains already and a misfortune happens to you, then you’re
ma­­terials used far more likely to think, ‘It must have been those peo-
for Caliban and ple who have caused this.’ ”
the Witch ( 2004) Around the world witch hunts have also been used
and other books. to directly seize land. A 2021 report on attacks in Odi-
sha, India, written jointly by a state government agency
and the social justice organization ActionAid, found
that a significant fraction of witch hunts involved
explicit land grabs. In Kilifi, Kenya, where hundreds of
men are accused of witchcraft every year, hunts often
stem from a desire to liquidate an elderly man’s land.
Mzee Samuel Kazungu, chair of a group of men from
15 Giriama subtribes in Kenya who convene to address
land disputes, told the outlet AllAfrica in 2021 that chil-
dren “start demanding inheritance . . . and since a
father is not ready to release his property, his family
will gang up against him and he will be branded a
witch, killed and the land will be sold.”
A close relative of Iquo Edet Eyo, who was murdered
last October in Nigeria, attributes the accusations
against her to jealousy: she owned land she cultivated,
and she also got financial help from her daughter, who
lived in the U.S. “When I was growing up, there were
always accusations of witchcraft, but there wasn’t any-
thing like this,” he says. “People didn’t go and drag folks
out in the square and beat them up and club them with
the machete.”
In Namibia, Berrie Holtzhausen, founder of Alz­
heim­er’s Dementia Namibia, a group that defends
elderly people with dementia (which can be seen as sig-
nifying a witch) from accusations, notes that people
who have become wealthy will often hide their assets
when visiting rural family members. They arrive with-
out their car, thinking, he says, that “if people see that
I’m doing well now, they will believe that I somehow
stole [through] magical powers.” There is also a gener-
ational conflict at work, pitting young men who see no
future except through the monetary economy against
an elderly population for whom security is having land,
trees or cows.
Professional witch finders make matters worse. In
some places, they double as pastors who, influenced by
evangelical and Pentecostal missionaries, encourage
believers to attribute their daily misfortunes to the work
of Satan. Some witch finders may genuinely believe that
they are protecting communities from danger, but just
like Hopkins in 17th-century England, many find the pro-
fession lucrative.
In Malawi, witch-hunters sometimes charge accused
witches up to $100, Igwe says. If the victims cannot pay,
the witch finders may seize their land or hold them hos-
tage until their family members pay up. In Namibia,
“for a witch doctor to make a ruling on whether or not
you are a witch, you have to pay him a lot of money,”
Holtz­haus­en says. “To survive a witch-hunt accusation,
you have to pay. The witch doctors are all rich people—
and the witch doctors are almost all men.”
52 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
T HE RESISTANCE
In recent years s tudents and others have campaigned
for justice for the 17th-century victims of New Eng-
land’s witch hunts. Massachusetts has exonerated
those who were charged of witchcraft there and issued
a formal apology, but a similar effort in Connecticut
this spring received unexpected pushback. “Do you
have any evidence that this person was innocent?” State
Representative Doug Dubitsky asked a descendant of
one of the executed women—apparently suggesting
that she could have been a witch after all.
Around the world women and organizations such
as AfAW, Stop Sorcery Violence in Papua New Guinea
and the women’s leadership nonprofit Anandi in Guja-
rat, India, are fighting back against witch-hunting. In
the summer of 2021, after six years of lobbying by a
coalition of witch-hunt survivors, nongovernmental
organizations, academics and lawyers, the United
Nations passed a resolution condemning witch-hunt-
ing and ritual attacks.
Laws against witch-hunting, such as those passed
in a number of Indian states, make it easier to prose-
cute people who accuse others of witchcraft. But Eyo’s
relative noted that in many places, poor people who
are victims of witch hunts have little access to legal
recourse. What may help reduce the persecutions, as
in South Africa, is providing pensions to the elderly,
which appears to confer social protection.
One of the most potent responses to modern-day
witch hunts is the struggle to hold back, and even
reverse, the process of land dispossession and wealth
concentration that began centuries ago during Europe’s
Great Hunt. In Brazil, women from a number of Indig-
enous groups have led an effort to defend the Amazon
forest and waters from extractive industries. In Bolivia,
they have marched repeatedly to prevent the construc-
tion of highways—which bring loggers, ranchers, set-
tlers and oil drillers—through Indigenous lands. In
Kenya, they have planted millions of trees as part of
the Greenbelt Movement, an effort for which Wangari
Maathai, its founder, won the Nobel Peace Prize in
2004. In India, they are engaged in numerous strug-
gles against logging and mining. And in the U.S., Native
American women played leading roles in the Standing
Rock movement to safeguard water from contamina-
tion by an oil pipeline.
These initiatives are not only oppositional but also
constructive. Even as they confront polluters and devel-
opers, women are involved in restoring forests, redis-
covering forms of agriculture that support rather than
destroy other creatures, and rebuilding a web of com-
munity relationships that represents the best form of
defense against violence.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Dialogues with the Dead. Piers Vitbesky; January 2023.
s c i e n t if i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a zi n e /s a
 May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 53

© 2023 Scientific American

54 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 BIOENGINEERING

Designing
Life
Synthetic morphology is enabling scientists to coax
living matter into shapes and forms never seen in nature
By Philip Ball
Illustration by Richard Borge

May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 55

© 2023 Scientific American

I
Philip Ball is a science writer and former Nature e ditor
based in London. His next book, H  ow Life Works
(University of Chicago Press), will be published in the
fall of 2023.

n the collection of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University reside the mummified
remains of a very peculiar creature. It has the shrunken head, torso and arms of
a monkey, but from the waist down, it is a fish. This bizarre hybrid was bought by
Moses Kimball, founder of the Boston Museum, from the family of a sea captain.
Kimball leased it in 1842 to the impresario P. T. Barnum for his popular American
Museum in New York City. Barnum claimed it was a mermaid found in Fiji.
In fact, such artifacts, typically intended for sale, will assemble. Using the cells of multicellular organ-
were made from animal parts by fishermen and arti- isms (like us), the technology might allow scientists to
sans in Japan at the time (although some of the mer- design entirely new tissues, organs, bodies and even
maid seems to be fashioned from papier-mâché). Myth- organisms by exploiting the tremendous versatility and
ical hybrid beasts such as mermaids, centaurs and chi- plasticity of form and function that seem to reside in
meras testify to our enduring fascination with the living matter. The possibilities are limited only by our
plasticity of biological form: the idea that natural organ- imagination, says bioengineer Roger D. Kamm of the
isms can mutate or be reconfigured. Both in legends Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We might de­­
and in fiction, from H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel T  he Island sign a novel organ, for instance, that secretes a partic-
of Doctor Moreau to the 2009 movie Splice, we seem ular biomolecule to treat a disease, similar to the way
inclined to imagine living organisms as assemblies of the pancreas secretes insulin. It could have sensor cells
parts that can be shuffled and rearranged at will. that monitor markers of the disease in the bloodstream,
But a crude stitching of components will not pro- akin to controlled-release implants already used to
duce a viable organism. Bodies aren’t a collection of administer drugs—but alive. Or, Kamm says, we could
arbitrary pieces; a human embryo grows into a being make “superorgans” such as eyes able to register ultra-
with the standard features of a human body, all the violet light outside the visible spectrum.
parts working in synchrony. Biological forms seem to Ultimately we can imagine creating entirely new liv-
have inevitable, unique target structures. ing beings—ones shaped not by evolution but by our
An emerging discipline called synthetic morphol- own designs. “By studying natural organisms, we are
ogy is now questioning that notion. It asks how, and just exploring a tiny corner of the option space of all pos-
how far, the natural shapes and compositions of living sible beings,” says biologist Michael Levin of Tufts Uni-
matter can be altered. The goal is not to create gro- versity. “Now we have the opportunity to really explore
tesque creatures such as the Fiji Mermaid but to under- this space.” Synthetic morphology poses deep questions
stand more about the rules of natural morphogenesis that challenge the status quo in biology: Where does
(the development of biological form) and to make use- form come from? What rules has evolution developed
ful structures and devices by engineering living tissue for controlling it? And what happens when we bypass
for applications in medicine, robotics, and beyond. them? Doing so could turn on their heads our traditional
Synthetic morphology might be considered the next notions of body, self and species—even of life itself.
stage of synthetic biology. The latter discipline has
racked up impressive achievements in retooling cells THE RULES OF LIVING FORM
for nonnatural tasks—for example, programming bac- Thinking of living matter a s a substance that can be
teria to glow in the presence of pollutants and other shaped and engineered at will was a revolutionary idea
chemicals. Much of synthetic biology involves genetic that arose in the 19th century. Zoologists had long
engineering to introduce networks of genes that give regarded biological forms as innate, and Charles Dar-
cells new functions, such as manufacturing enzymes win argued that natural selection sculpts them to be
to make a nonnatural molecule. adapted to their environment. In the mid-1800s oth-
Synthetic morphology works at the next level: con- ers, such as Darwin’s supporter Thomas Henry Huxley,
trolling the shapes and forms into which many cells began to suspect that there was a generic form of

56 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

“living matter”—often called protoplasm—from which
the most primitive life-forms were fashioned.
In his 1912 book The Mechanistic Conception of Life,
German physiologist Jacques Loeb argued that life could
and should be understood according to engineering
principles. After discovering that he could stimulate
asexual reproduction by treating unfertilized sea urchin
eggs with simple salt solutions, he became convinced
that nature’s way of doing things with living matter is
not the only way. “The idea is now hovering before me,”
he wrote, “that man himself can act as a creator, even in
living nature, forming it eventually according to his will.”
Around the same time Loeb’s book was published,
French physician Alexis Carrel developed techniques
for growing tissues in a culture medium: a kind of
unformed living material. He hoped it might become
possible not just to preserve but to grow organs outside
the body for transplantation when the natural ones
wear out, thereby conveying the prospect of immortality.
That hasn’t happened, but tissue culture is now a
well-established technology used to make, for instance,
synthetic skin for grafts. It is now routine to cultivate
living cells, including those of human tissues, in a petri
dish, sustaining them with the nutrients they need to
metabolize, replicate and thrive—much as we can grow
colonies of bacteria or yeast.
The idea of cells as the “building blocks” of our bod-
ies might make them seem rather passive, like mere bricks
to be stacked in the masonry of tissues. But they are much
smarter than that. Each cell is in many respects a living
entity in its own right, able to reproduce, make decisions,
and respond and adapt to its environment. Multicellu-
lar living matter concocts its own schemes, which means
cells won’t necessarily stay in the same place or state.
This is strikingly apparent in the development of a
new organism—a human being, say—from a single fer-
tilized egg, or zygote. As that single cell becomes two,
four and eventually many billions, it changes from what
looks like an unstructured ball of identical cells to a body
with a well-defined shape containing distinct tissues in
which cells carry out different roles—producing the elec-
trically coordinated contractions of the heart, for exam-
ple, or secreting the hormone insulin in the pancreas.
Scientists and natural philosophers have wondered
for millennia where this body plan comes from. How
does the featureless blob that is the early embryo know
what to make and where to make it? The answer,
according to biology textbooks, is that the plan is con-
tained in the cells’ DNA, encoded by genes. But this
notion quickly falls apart. Yes, all the zygote seems to
get by way of instruction is a genome, but you will look
there in vain for any blueprint for a heart or brain. The
genes simply encode proteins or other molecules that
can ramp their production up or down.
It’s better to think of the molecular networks of the
cell as encoding certain behaviors and tendencies,
from which morphology emerges when those impulses
play out among many cells. To understand—and per-
haps ultimately to control—the forms of multicellular
Graphics by Jen Christiansen
© 2023 Scientific American
structures, we need to figure out these behavioral rules.
Cells produce order and form by communicating
with and responding to one another. Each is bounded
by a membrane studded with molecules, generally pro-
teins. These molecules are capable of receiving signals
at the cell surface and converting them into messages
within the cell’s internal networks, typically ending
with the activation or suppression of specific genes.
There are three main modes of communication for
these externally derived signals. One is chemical: a mol-
ecule arrives at the cell surface and binds to a protein
receptor there, triggering some change in the receptor
that initiates a signaling cascade in the cell’s interior.
Alternatively, activity within a cell can be altered by
mechanical signals such as stretching of the membrane
when another cell sticks to and pulls it. Typically these
mechanical signals are “transduced”—converted to
some internal effect—by membrane proteins that alter
their behavior when pulled or squeezed, to admit or
exclude, for instance, electrically charged ions attempt-
ing to enter the cell.
The third mode is directly electrical. Ions passing
across a cell’s membrane can make the cell electrically
polarized. That’s how electrical signals are transmitted
through heart muscle to induce regular contractions:
the pulses travel from cell to cell via connections called
gap junctions. Such electrical signaling is a capability
shared by most cells.
Cell Communication
Chemical signals Mechanical signals Electrical signals
Molecule Cytoskeleton
Ions +
Receptor
Cascade + +
Cells
+
Response
+
Pulse
+ +
+
Tension +
Ion channel
Cell
Nucleus
Nucleus
Response Response Neuron
Levin thinks bioelectric signaling between cells cre-
ates particularly powerful information-processing
capabilities that can influence morphology. It therefore
represents a useful “control knob” for applications in
regenerative medicine and synthetic morphology, he
says. Levin, Vaibhav Pai of Tufts and their colleagues
have shown that the development of neural structures
in the frog brain seems to be governed by the voltage
across the membranes of embryonic cells. When the
re­­searchers permanently activated a key gene called
Notch (one of the factors that induces precursor cells
to be­­come neurons in frog embryos), brain develop-
ment was disrupted. But they were able to put it back
on the right track by changing the membrane voltage
of other cells nearby: the bioelectrical signal overrode
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 57
the message coming from the genes, allowing proper
morphogenesis to proceed.
Morphogenesis is a subtle process involving the
interplay of information at the scales of the whole
organism, the genetic and molecular activity in its cells,
and everything in between—a complex mixture of bot-
tom-up, top-down and middle-out signaling. If cells
multiply faster in one part of the embryo than another,
the developing tissue may buckle and fold. This defor-
mation creates mechanical stresses that feed back into
those cells to switch certain genes on and off, differen-
tiating the cells from others around them and direct-
ing them along a developmental trajectory toward a
particular tissue or organ.
In another example, as a mass of cells grows in a
fetus, those in the interior might get cut off from the
oxygen-ferrying blood pulsing down capillaries, trigger-
ing them to produce and release chemicals that induce
some of their neighbors to develop into blood-vessel-
forming cells. There was never any blueprint for a vas-
cular system in the cells’ DNA; rather the eventual net-
work of branching tubes is an emergent morphology
produced by the rules of cell interaction and response.
“The genome specifies a cellular collective with mas-
sive plasticity,” Levin says, “which executes rearrange-
ments until the correct target morphology is achieved.”
One of the most striking illustrations of the existence
of such target forms is the way a tube called the pro-
nephric duct, a precursor to the kidney, grows in newts.
If cells had genetic instructions telling them to assem-
ble into a tube, we would expect bigger cells to make a
proportionately bigger tube. In the 1940s, however,
embryologist Gerhard Fankhauser tested this idea by
using cells with extra chromosomes that made them
grow larger than their usual size. He found that a tube
of normal diameter and thickness developed—it just
contained fewer cells. The largest cells changed shape
to make the structure almost on their own. It was as if
the cells collectively “knew” what their target structure
was and adjusted their individual behavior accordingly.
Albert Einstein was fascinated by these experiments,
writing to Fankhauser that “what the real determinant
of form and organization is seems quite obscure.”
An even more striking example of this apparent “over-
all vision” of multicellular structures is found in primi-
tive flatworms called planarians. Cut a chunk out of a
planarian, and it will regrow exactly those tissues that
were removed, neither more nor less. Even a small part
of a planarian can regenerate into a full worm with the
typical shape and proportions. This capacity is all too evi-
dently lacking in humans—so how do planarians do it?
It seems to entail an ability of the regenerating cells to
“read” the overall body plan: to take a peek at the whole,
ask what’s missing and adapt accordingly to preserve
morphological integrity. They are able to make use of top-
down information. Levin believes this information is
delivered to the cells via bioelectric signaling, which gov-
erns the maintenance of form in other organisms such
as fish, frogs and humans. When he and his colleagues
58 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
manipulated pieces of planarians to alter their bioelec-
tric state, the regenerating cells produced unexpected
anatomies—for example, worms with a head at each end.
Such regenerative potential is available to amphib-
ians such as axolotls and salamanders, which can
regrow limbs and tails that have been amputated. That
feat demands two morphological capacities: the
regrowing cells must be able to develop into many tis-
sue types, such as skin, muscle, bone and blood vessel,
and those tissues have to spontaneously organize them-
selves in the right way. Amphibians keep a reserve of
such versatile cells, called stem cells, for repair jobs. If
we are to find ways of imbuing our own bodies with
regenerative powers, we need to know and master the
global rules governing form.
THE PLASTICITY OF CELLS
All embryos contain a ball of cells that are able to
develop into any of the body’s tissue types, a property
called pluripotency. In humans, however, these cells
gradually lose this plasticity through a succession of
transformations that differentiate them into special-
ized roles. It was long assumed that when these embry-
onic cells lose their pluripotency, that versatility is gone
forever. But in 2006 biologist Shinya Yamanaka of the
University of California, San Francisco, and his co-work-
ers showed that this isn’t so. They were able to switch
mature, differentiated mammalian cells back into a
stem-cell-like state by injecting them with a cocktail of
the genes that are active in embryonic stem cells (ESCs),
essentially rewinding the clock of embryo development.
Their experiment demonstrates that the fates of our
cells, and the nature of our tissues and bodies, are far
less inevitable and inexorable than people had thought:
living matter is plastic and programmable.
Pluripotency
Embryonic cell Induced
(inherent pluripotent
pluripotency) stem cell (iPS)
A mature
Differentiation
cell can be
reprogrammed
Intermediate cell types back into a stem
cell state (iPS)
Endoderm cell Mesoderm cell Ectoderm cell
Mature cells
Intestinal Pancreatic Red blood
cell beta cell Muscle cell cell Neuron Skin cell
 Cell reprogramming is now being explored for
regenerative medicine. Some researchers are seeking
to combat macular degeneration, a common cause of
blindness, by reprogramming cells in the eye to sup-
port light-sensitive retinal cells. Others hope to cure
neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s or spi-
nal injuries by using neurons made from induced plu-
ripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that can restore damaged
connections in the nerve networks.
When cells are reprogrammed, they also acquire
new morphological knowhow. For example, skin cells
reprogrammed into iPSCs that are then cultured as
neurons in a petri dish might not simply grow into a
tangled mass. In the right growth medium, they might
instead try to become a brain, recapitulating some of
the structures seen in developing brains, with orga-
nized layers of cortexlike neurons and some of the char-
acteristic folds seen in a mature cortex.
Such reprogrammed cells are not terribly good at
making whole organs because they are missing some
important information that, in an embryo, would come
from the surrounding tissues. And currently such
“organoids” can’t grow very large because they lack a
vascular network, meaning the cells in the center even-
tually become starved of nutrients. To solve that prob-
lem, researchers are looking for ways to encourage
some of the cells to develop into blood vessels. If trans-
planted into mice, liver organoids will spontaneously
integrate with the animal’s own blood supply.
Another demonstration of the versatility of cells in
multicellular structures is provided by so-called chi-
meric embryos, which contain cells from more than
one type of organism. Because very different species
usually can’t interbreed, monstrous hybrids such as the
Chimera of Greek mythology seemed biologically
implausible; the only way to make something like the
Fiji Mermaid was to crudely stitch together lifeless car-
casses. But at the level of individual cells, the species
barrier isn’t as important as we might think. All cells
speak much the same language, and those of different
species seem to get along fairly well in an embryo. Sci-
entists have created several chimeric animals—mosa-
ics of cells of different species, such as the goat-sheep
blend called a geep—by adding stem cells from one spe-
cies to the embryo of another.
The further the evolutionary distance, the more pre-
carious the chimera becomes. Some researchers are now
experimenting to see whether “human” organs, made
from human stem cells (either ESCs or iPSCs), can be
grown in livestock animals such as pigs and cows to cre-
ate a reservoir of organs for transplantation.
All this testifies to the fact that there is nothing fixed
or inevitable about biological morphology at the level
of cells. If that seems surprising, it is perhaps because
we have been so wedded to the blueprint picture of
developmental biology. But that picture demands exces-
sive—in fact impossible—overspecification of the body
plan. A blueprint could never, for example, dictate how
every one of our 86 billion neurons should be wired up.
© 2023 Scientific American
All evolution needed to do was specify basic rules of cell
communication and behavior that, when played out in
the known, predictable environment of the womb or
egg, would reliably create a specific morphology.
Perhaps that is the most efficient way to make com-
plex organisms: not to program every cell to go to a par-
ticular place and become a specific thing in a paint-by-
numbers fashion, but rather to give cells rules of inter-
action that enable them to figure the rest out for
themselves. Change the environment, though, and those
same rules might produce a very different end result.
That was startlingly illustrated in recent work by Levin,
Douglas Blackiston of Tufts and their colleagues. They
simply broke up frog embryos into small pieces and left
them to do what they would in a nutrient medium. “If
we give them the opportunity to reenvision multicellu-
larity,” Levin says, then “what is it that they will build?”
Over a couple of days the cells clumped into little
clusters that began behaving like multicellular micro-
organisms, sprouting cilia, hairlike protrusions that
beat in a synchronized way to propel the clusters
through the fluid. These structures, which the research-
ers called xenobots (in reference to the Latin name of
the original organism, the African clawed frog X  eno-
pus laevis), will re-form their shape if damaged, sug-
gesting that there is some kind of “goal” to their mor-
phology. It was as if the genetic instructions in these
cells, combined with the laws of cell interaction they
support, could give rise to a completely different kind
of organism than the frogs that would develop in nor-
mal circumstances. “We have the opportunity to make
creatures in 48 hours that have never existed before,”
Levin says. Now he is imagining making organisms that
are reconfigurable and “immortal” in that “when they
die, the individual cells crawl off and make their life
alone and maybe rejoin again later into something else.”
MORPHOLOGICAL ENGINEERING
Organoids, c himeras and xenobots all suggest that cells
can make stable entities other than those Darwinian
evolution supplies. We can select and generate target
morphologies by design. “We can definitely force cells
to create shapes that are not natural,” says cell biolo-
gist Marta Shahbazi Alonso of the University of Cam-
bridge. Working out the rules governing synthetic mor-
phology, however, is a much harder task than figuring
out how to build with blocks that have specific assem-
bly rules, such as LEGO bricks.
With cells, the blocks are themselves changed by
the assembly process. “In a simple mechanical world,
you would have pieces that interact with each other fol-
lowing a set of rules to build more complex structures,”
Shahbazi Alonso says. But, she adds, the “beauty of
development”—and also the complication—is that “the
process of building a structure changes the very nature
of the building blocks. Throughout development there
is constant cross talk from processes that happen at
different scales of biological organization.”
Synthetic morphology, then, demands a new view
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 59
of engineering in which we assemble objects from their
basic components not in a simple assembly-line man-
ner according to a blueprint. We must exploit rules of
interaction to enable a desired structure to emerge as
if by collective agreement of the parts—by recognizing
that those parts themselves have a kind of agency. Com-
putational biologist René Doursat of the Complex Sys-
tems Institute in Paris identifies four categories of pro-
cesses involved in such morphological engineering:
Agents can attach to one another in a programmed con-
struction or assemble via swarmlike coalescing. Alter-
natively, a structure may develop via growth and mul-
tiplication of the components, or it can generate itself
by repeating an algorithm, like that which produces
the fractal forms of plants.
Synthetic Morphology Engineering Approaches
Construct
Time
Coalesce
Develop
Generate
The challenge, Doursat says, is to find ways of ensur-
ing reliable outcomes that will not be thwarted by small
perturbations and that are adaptive—if circumstances
change, the system needs to be able to find a solution
that does the job. This philosophy has much in com-
mon with the way we create cities and societies: We
have some idea of what we would like, but we can’t con-
trol it from the bottom up. We can only try to guide the
self-organization along the right lines.
Doursat and his colleagues have proposed theoret-
ical schemes for building with bacteria in this way,
using synthetic genetic circuits to imbue them with
interaction rules that will produce simple geometric
elements made of many cells, such as rods and rings.
Those shapes might then be assembled into higher-
order structures. Some of the earliest work on multi-
cellular synthetic biology also used bacteria. For exam-
ple, Frances H. Arnold of Caltech, Ron Weiss of M.I.T.
60 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
and their co-workers engineered a population of bac-
teria with genetic circuitry that allowed each cell to
sense the population density in its environment and
control the rate of spontaneous cell death, keeping the
population growth within specified limits.
Kamm and Weiss, together with tissue engineer
Linda G. Griffith, also at M.I.T., recently launched a
multidisciplinary Center for Multi-Cellular Engineered
Living Systems at the university, which builds on such
work to create multicellular systems with specific func-
tions by design. They believe that making these living
systems will require a range of approaches, including
everything from top-down patterning (where the cells
are inserted into position “by hand”) to bottom-up self-
organization (where the cells are programmed to self-
assemble into a target structure).
Suppose you need to replace an artery and want to
make a simple flow valve consisting of a blood-vessel-
like tube of cells that is encircled at one point by a ring
of muscle cells able to contract. You could make these
two shapes out of a synthetic scaffold, such as a biode-
gradable polymer, and seed them with the two cell types,
which would colonize the relevant components. That’s
the top-down approach. Or you could start with a clus-
ter of stem cells that can be tweaked and guided to dif-
ferentiate in the right way while they move and coordi-
nate with one another, eventually producing that same
structure—that’s bottom-up, and more like the way the
body builds such structures. The first approach may be
simpler and could involve tools such as bioprinting, in
which cells are delivered to specified locations by an ink-
jet-style device. But it might be harder to keep the result-
ing structure stable. What if different types of cells want
to fuse or develop into other tissues? The bottom-up
approach, in contrast, would build on stem cells’ ability
to sustain themselves and make repairs if damaged.
Kamm says we don’t yet have good methods for reli-
ably generating and predicting such outcomes. But
they’re coming. One useful tool is optogenetics, which is
already used to study the neural basis of behavior by
switching specific neurons on and off. In this approach,
scientists use genetic engineering to direct cells to make
light-operated protein switches that control their electri-
cal state. Fine laser beams can then be used to activate
specific cells in a group and send them along particular
developmental trajectories. Kamm says it might also be
possible to selectively activate and differentiate cells
mechanically (by poking them in various locations or
using light-based optical tweezers to pull on them), ther-
mally and bioelectrically (by, say, changing their mem-
brane potentials at certain locations).
BUILDING NEW LIFE
What should we build w  ith such tools? One goal is to
create living multicellular structures that resemble but
don’t exactly mirror natural ones: a simplified, idealized
tissue or organism, for instance, that helps to elucidate
the processes that go on in the natural, more complex
variety. Several researchers are assembling human stem
cells into embryolike structures (“embryoids”) so they
can watch the very early stages of embryogenesis in vitro.
If grown outside the uterus, the embryo cells don’t
receive essential signals from their environment that
would help orient and guide their development. They
may begin to differentiate into the more specialized
types that would eventually become part of tissues such
as skin, blood and nerves—but it happens in a rather
random, unstructured way. In 2014, however, Ali H.
Brivanlou of the Rockefeller University and his co-
workers showed that merely confining human ESCs
within small circular “sticky” patches is enough to
instill some order.
Brivanlou and other researchers are finding ways to
make embryoids ever more like the real thing. Magda-
lena Żernicka-Goetz of the University of Cambridge and
her colleagues have demonstrated that if they mix
mouse ESCs with two other embryonic cell types (tro-
phoblast stem cells and extraembryonic endoderm stem
cells), they will organize themselves into a kind of hol-
low structure like a peanut shell that resembles the cen-
tral amniotic cavity of real embryos. The cells seem to
“know,” roughly, what an embryo looks like, and they
not only organize themselves accordingly but also begin
to differentiate into the correct specialized tissues.
It’s not clear how far these embryoids might be
grown in vitro—but Żernicka-Goetz and others have
made embryoids that will develop to the stage where
limbs and organs start to form. If an embryoid were to
be implanted in a womb—a procedure that would clearly
be unethical in humans but might be contemplated in
other animals—who knows what it might go on to do?
That’s not a rhetorical question. We can’t take it for
granted that a synthetic embryoid will somehow find
its way onto the usual track of embryo growth. It might
pursue a different path entirely. That’s one reason for
the lack of consensus on the ethical management of
these entities. Should they be subject to the same rules
and regulation that govern research with human
embryos? Or are they a different thing entirely, one
made of human cells on a different developmental path?
Robotic engineers are using living tissues as com-
ponents in otherwise conventional robots. They gen-
erate behaviors that would be tricky to engineer with
purely artificial materials and devices. Kit Parker of
Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engi-
neering has collaborated with aeronautical engineer
John Dabiri of Caltech and bioengineer Janna Nawroth
of the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus in Germany to make
a “medusoid,” a creature that looks like a jellyfish robot.
It uses rat muscle tissue attached to a silicone polymer
to produce undulating contractions, which allow it to
swim like a real jellyfish. Parker and his colleagues also
used rat heart muscle cells in a robot that swims by
means of rippling motions modeled on those of the ray
fish. By using optogenetics to control the activity of the
muscle cells, the researchers were able to regulate the
speed and turning motion of the robot so it could be
guided by light through an obstacle course.
© 2023 Scientific American
Chemical biologist Adam Cohen of Harvard and his
co-workers, meanwhile, have made an “engineered bio-
electric tissue” that can generate electrical oscillations.
The electrically active cells in their structures were
human embryonic kidney cells they engineered to pro-
duce ion-channel proteins, which let ions flow in or out
to regulate the potential of the cell membrane. In some
of the cells, the researchers used genetic engineering to
add genes encoding other ion channels, enabling opto-
Synthetic morphology demands
a new view of engineering,
one in which we exploit rules
of interaction to enable a desired
structure to emerge.
genetic switching with red and blue light. By combining
these cell types in a ring, they made a light-activated
structure that generated waves of electrical activity mov-
ing around the ring. The waves could be made to travel
in either direction, meaning these structures could be
used to encode binary information. Perhaps we could
ultimately process data in a kind of living computer.
Understanding the rules that govern biological mor-
phology might open up new possibilities for entirely arti-
ficial technologies such as robotics. James Sharpe of the
European Molecular Biology Laboratory Barcelona and
Sabine Hauert of the University of Bristol in England
have programmed coin-sized cylindrical robots to self-
assemble in swarms using principles that mimic those
of living cells, communicating via short-range infrared
signals. The swarms show a pseudobiological ability to
form robust collective shapes that can adapt to damage
and self-repair: a kind of inorganic, robotic tissue.
Levin thinks all this is just the start for synthetic
morphology. “My conjecture is that cell collectives are
universal constructors,” he says. Given a particular set
of living components, we can make them do anything
that is acceptable within the laws of physics.
But to do that, we’ll need a new mindset for engineer-
ing—one appropriate for dealing with materials that are
not merely “smart” in the traditional sense of respond-
ing to their environment but that have genuine agency.
This collaboration between engineers and their materi-
als might entail letting go of some of our conventional
categories for distinguishing ma­­chines, robots and
organisms. Synthetic morphology implies that life can
be remade if we relax the boundaries separating the nat-
ural from the artificial.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Life, New and Improved. Rowan Jacobsen; July 2021.
s c i e n t if i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a zi n e /s a
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 61
62 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 PA R T I C L E

The
PHYSIC S

Weight
of
Nothing The Archimedes experiment
aims to measure the void
of empty space more precisely
than ever before
By Manon Bischoff

Photographs by Vincent Fournier

A DUST SHEET shrouds the Archimedes

experiment, which will try to weigh
the “virtual particles” that fill empty space.

May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 63

© 2023 Scientific American

 Manon Bischoff is a theoretical physicist and editor
at Spektrum, a partner publication of Scientific American.

I
t does something to you when you drive in here for the first time,” Enrico Calloni says
as our car bumps down into the tunnel of a mine on the Italian island of Sardinia. After the in­­
tense heat aboveground, the contrast is stark. Within seconds, damp, cool air enters the car as it
makes its way into the depths. “I hope you’re not claustrophobic.” This narrow tunnel, which
leads us in almost complete darkness to a depth of 110 meters underground, isn’t for everyone.
But it’s the ideal site for the project we are about to see—the Archimedes experiment, named after
a phenomenon first described by the ancient Greek scientist, which aims to weigh “nothing.”
The car stops, and our driver, Luca Loddo, gets out and equips gate the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics—
everyone with helmets and flashlights. We cover the last part of the amount of energy in the empty space that fills the universe.
the trip on foot, deeper and deeper into the tunnel. We pass a Researchers can calculate the energy of the vacuum in two
door to a room where seismographs record the subtle movements ways. From a cosmological perspective, they can use Albert Ein­
of the surrounding earth. Finally, a cave appears on the left side stein’s equations of general relativity to calculate how much en­
of the tunnel, with a spotlight pointing at it, and we stop. “This ergy is needed to explain the fact that the universe is expanding
is where it’s supposed to take place,” explains Calloni, a physicist at an accelerated rate. They can also work from the bottom up,
at the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics. using quantum field theory to predict the value based on the
Geologically, Sardinia is one of the quietest places in Europe. masses of all the “virtual particles” that can briefly arise and then
The island, along with its neighbor Corsica, is located on a partic­ disappear in “empty” space (more on this later). These two meth­
ularly secure block of Earth’s crust that is among the most stable ods produce numbers that differ by more than 120 orders of mag­
areas of the Mediterranean, with very few earthquakes in its entire nitude (1 followed by 120 zeros). It’s an embarrassingly absurd
recorded history and only one (offshore) event that ever reached discrepancy that has important implications for our understand­
the relatively mild category of magnitude 5. Physicists chose this ing of the expansion of the universe—and even its ultimate fate.
geologically uneventful place because the Archimedes experiment To figure out where the error lies, scientists are hauling a two-
requires extreme isolation from the outside environment. It in­ meter-tall cylindrical vacuum chamber and other equipment
volves a high-precision experimental setup designed to investi­ down into an old Sardinian mine where they will attempt to cre­
ate their own vacuum and weigh the nothing inside.

I WHAT’S IN EMPTY SPACE?

T A vacuum is not completely empty. This is because of an idea in
CORSICA A quantum physics called Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The
L
Sos Enattos mine Y principle states that you can’t determine the position and the ve­
(experiment site) locity of a particle at the same time with any precision—the more
precisely you know one value, the less precisely you can know the
Ty other. This principle also applies to other measurements, such as
r r
SARDINIA h e
n i a those involving energy and time. Its consequences are consider­
n S e a able. It means that nature can “borrow” energy for extremely
short amounts of time. These changes in energy, known as vac­
M e d i t e uum fluctuations, often take the form of virtual particles, which
r r a can appear out of nowhere and disappear again immediately.
n e SICIL
a n Y
S e a Vacuum fluctuations have to respect some rules. A single elec­
trical charge, for example, cannot suddenly appear where there

64 Scientific American, May 2023 Map by Jo Hannah Asetre

© 2023 Scientific American

PHYSICIST ENRICO CALLONI leads a team aiming to measure
a minute signal with a complex and sensitive beam balance.
was none (this would violate the law of charge conservation).
This means that only electrically neutral particles such as pho­
tons can pop out of the vacuum by themselves. Electrically
charged particles have to emerge paired with their antiparticle
matches. An electron, for instance, can appear along with a pos­
itron, which is positively charged; the two charges cancel each
other out to preserve the total charge of zero. The result is that
the vacuum is continuously filled with a stream of short-lived
particles buzzing around.
Even if we can’t capture these virtual particles in detectors,
their presence is measurable. One example is the Casimir effect,
predicted by Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir in 1948. Accord­
ing to his calculations, two opposing metal plates should attract
each other in a vacuum, even without taking into account the
slight gravitational pull they exert on each other. The reason? Vir­
tual particles. The presence of the plates imposes certain limits
on which virtual particles can emerge from the vacuum. For ex­
ample, photons (particles of light) with certain energies can’t ap­
pear between the plates. That’s because the metal plates act like
mirrors that reflect the photons back and forth. Photons with cer­
tain wavelengths will end up with wave troughs overlapping wave
crests, effectively canceling themselves out. Other wavelengths
will be amplified if two wave peaks overlap. The result is that cer­
tain energies are preferred, and others are suppressed as if those
Graphics by Jen Christiansen
© 2023 Scientific American
photons were never there. This means that only virtual particles
with certain energy values can exist between the plates. Outside
them, however, any virtual particles can emerge.
Casimir Effect
Virtual particle energy
Time
Fewer virtual
photon wavelengths
Mirror plates
are allowed between the
Vacuum plates than outside them.
The result is that there are fewer possibilities—and therefore
fewer virtual particles—between the plates than around them.
The comparative abundance of particles on the outside exerts
pressure on the plates, pressing them together. This effect, strange
as it may sound, is measurable. Physicist Steven Lamoreaux con­
firmed the phenomenon experimentally at the University of
Washington in 1997, almost 50 years after Casimir’s prediction.
Now Calloni and his colleagues hope to use the Casimir effect to
measure the energy of the void.
This energy has important consequences for the universe as
a whole. General relativity tells us that energy (for example, in
the form of mass) curves spacetime. That means virtual particles,
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 65
66 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 CALLONI points to a beam that will tilt with respect
to another beam if a signal appears.

May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 67

© 2023 Scientific American

AN INTERFEROMETER w  ill use lasers to measure
any slight displacement in the beam balance.
which change the energy of the vacuum for a short time, have an
effect on the shape and the development of our universe. When
this connection first became clear, cosmologists hoped it would
solve a major puzzle in their field: the value of the cosmological
constant, another way of describing the energy in empty space.
THE COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT
Einstein published his general theory of relativity in 1915, but he
soon realized he had a problem. The theory seemed to predict an
expanding universe, yet astronomers at the time believed that
our cosmos was static: that space had a fixed, unchanging size.
Three years after he published the theory, Einstein found that
he could add a term called the cosmological constant to his equa­
tions without changing the fundamental laws of physics. Given
the right value, this term would ensure that the universe neither
expands nor contracts. In the 1920s, however, astronomer Edwin
Hubble used the largest telescope of the time, the Hooker tele­
scope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California, to observe that
the farther away a galaxy was from Earth, the faster it seemed to
be receding. This trend revealed that space was, in fact, expand­
ing. Einstein discarded the cosmological constant, calling it “folly.”
More than half a century later there was another twist: By ob­
serving distant supernovae, two research teams independently
proved that the universe isn’t just expanding—it’s doing so at an
accelerated rate. The force that pushes space apart has since been
68 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
called dark energy. It acts as a kind of counterpart to gravity, pre­
venting all massive objects from eventually collapsing into one
place. According to theoretical predictions, dark energy accounts
for about 68 percent of the total energy in space. At this point, the
cosmological constant came back into fashion as a possible expla­
nation for this mysterious form of energy. And the cosmological
constant, in turn, is thought to get its energy from the vacuum.
At first, the scientific community was delighted: it seemed that
general relativity’s constant was the result of the energy of virtual
particles in empty space. Two different fields of physics—relativity
and quantum theory—were coming together to explain the accel­
erated expansion of the universe. But the joy didn’t last long. When
scientists did the two calculations, the energy of the vacuum based
on quantum field theory turned out to be much larger—120 orders
of magnitude higher—than the value of the cosmological constant
astronomers derived from measuring the universe’s expansion. The
best way to resolve the discrepancy would be to measure the energy
present in the vacuum directly—by weighing virtual particles.
A SCALE FOR THE UNIVERSE
If the vacuum energy d  erived from quantum theory is correct,
then something must be stifling this energy’s effects on the ex­
pansion of space. If this value were the true strength of dark en­
ergy, space would be ballooning much, much faster. If, on the
other hand, the value from cosmology is right, then physicists are
vastly overestimating how much energy virtual particles contrib­
ute to the vacuum.
That vacuum fluctuations and virtual particles exist has been
widely accepted at least since the Casimir effect was demonstrated.
And quantum theory’s predicted strength for the fluctuations can’t
be completely off, either, because laboratory experiments confirm
the theory to great precision. But might it be possible that virtual
particles don’t actually gravitate the way we think and therefore
don’t affect the weight of space as we tend to expect?
So far no direct measurements have ever been made of how
virtual particles behave with respect to gravity. And some scien­
tists have suggested they may interact with gravity differently than
ordinary matter does. For instance, in 1996 physicists Alexander
Kaganovich and Eduardo Guendelman of Ben-Gurion University
in Israel worked out a theoretical model in which the fluctuations
of the vacuum have no gravitational effect. This might be the case
if there are extra dimensions beyond the regular three of space
and one of time that we’re familiar with. These hidden dimensions
might modify the behavior of gravity on very small scales.
Yet mass differences in atomic nuclei of elements such as alu­
minum and platinum can be explained only if certain quantum
fluctuations contribute to their weight. That’s why many physicists
are convinced virtual particles interact with gravity just as ordi­
nary particles do. “There are clear indications of this but so far no
direct proof,” says theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, who was in­
volved in the Archimedes experiment’s theoretical planning.
To verify that virtual particles interact with gravity like normal
matter, the Archimedes team members want to use the Casimir
effect to weigh virtual particles with a simple beam balance. The
balance will sit inside their vacuum chamber, a cylindrical con­
tainer of “nothing” that will be nested in several layers of insula­
tion to keep it extremely cold and protected from the outside en­
vironment. Those layers, in turn, will sit deep inside the Sardin­
ian cave, protecting the delicate apparatus from every possible
influence of the aboveground world. These barriers are necessary
because the scientists are searching for a minute signal: the slight
movement of the balance when the Casimir effect turns on, chang­
ing the weight of a sample material by altering the population of
virtual particles inside it. “In principle, we have known the basic
principles needed for this for decades,” explains postdoctoral re­
searcher Luciano Errico, a member of the experiment team. “I
wondered myself at first why it took so long to tackle this task.”
In 1929 physicist Richard Tolman wondered if certain forms
of energy (he focused on heat) could be weighed. Seven decades
later Calloni thought about pushing the idea forward. After read­
ing a technical paper by the late physicist Steven Weinberg, he
envisioned weighing the gravitational contribution of virtual par­
ticles using Archimedes’ principle, which states that when a body
is immersed in fluid, it experiences an upward buoyant force
equal to the weight of the fluid that the body displaces. If virtual
particles have weight, then a cavity of metal plates in a vacuum
should experience a buoyant force. The cavity is essentially dis­
placing the regular vacuum, with its abundant virtual particles,
with a lighter vacuum containing fewer virtual particles. Deter­
mining the strength of the buoyant force, which depends on the
density of the virtual particles, will reveal their weight.
To measure this force within their vacuum tube, the research­
ers will suspend two samples made of different materials from a
two-meter-tall, 1.50-meter-wide balance and induce the Casimir
effect within one. To do this, they will heat both materials at reg­
ular intervals by about four degrees Celsius and then cool them
down again. This temperature difference is sufficient for one of
© 2023 Scientific American
the samples to switch back and forth between a superconduct­
ing phase (when electricity flows freely within the material) and
an insulating phase (when electricity cannot easily flow). The
other material, however, always remains an insulator. As the con­
ductivity changes in the first sample, it acts like the classic two-
plate setup, and the number of possible virtual particles within
it varies. Thus, the buoyancy force periodically increases and de­
creases on the first weight. This variation should cause the bal­
ance to oscillate at regular intervals, like a seesaw with two chil­
dren sitting on it.
In planning the experiment, the scientists needed to find a suit­
able material that could be heated and cooled uniformly and
quickly and that exhibited a strong Casimir effect. After consider­
ing several options, the team chose superconducting crystals called
cuprates. The resulting samples are disks with a diameter of about
10 centimeters that are only several millimeters thick. To date, no
one has proved that the Casimir effect works in high-temperature
superconductors, but the scientists are betting that it does.
Archimedes Scheme
Reference arm Interferometer
Balancing arm Suspended
disk made of
cuprates (can
Vacuum switch from
superconductor
Suspended to insulator)
disk (remains
in insulator
phase)
The researchers have rigged the balance so that it hangs freely
in space within its vacuum chamber, which will cool the entire
apparatus to less than 90 kelvins (just under –180 degrees Cel­
sius). The chamber itself will be packed into two larger metal con­
tainers—one canister filled with liquid nitrogen, within another
airless container, which acts like a thermos. Without that final
cocoon, the second layer would heat up too quickly. The entire
structure will be about three meters high, wide and deep and will
weigh several tons.
A SENSITIVE SIGNAL
Calloni began working w  ith colleagues in 2002 to develop a the­
oretical model to calculate the strength of the buoyancy force for
different experimental setups. They found the force in a realis­
tic experiment would be about 10–16 newton. Measuring such a
tiny force is like trying to weigh the DNA in a cell. “The numbers
are devastating,” says physicist Ulf Leonhardt of the Weizmann
Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. “On the other hand, 10
years ago hardly anyone believed gravitational waves could now
be detected.”
In fact, the technology in today’s gravitational-wave detectors,
which first observed their target in 2015, could help detect the
tiny gravitational signals the Archimedes experiment seeks. Cal­
loni himself was involved in building the Italian gravitational-
wave detector VIRGO. “It is only because of the extremely sensi­
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 69
70 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 THE EXPERIMENT w  ill eventually be housed
in an abandoned Sardinian mine.

May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 71

© 2023 Scientific American

tive instruments made for precision measurements of gravita­
tional waves that all this is possible,” Errico says.
To be able to detect the minuscule deflections it seeks, the Ar­
chimedes experiment will use two laser systems that share some
similarities with the laser-and-mirrors setups within gravita­
tional-wave detectors. The first splits a laser beam in two by di­
recting it through a beam splitter to both ends of the scale, where
they are reflected by attached mirrors. The beams are then re­
combined by further mirrors and travel to a detector. If the beam
is in balance, the two beams will travel exactly the same distance.
If the arm is slightly tilted in one direction, the beams will cover
different distances. In that case, the crests and troughs of the la­
ser beam waves will meet in the measuring device in a staggered
manner, producing a different intensity. This system can detect
even the smallest deviations from equilibrium.
Aligned Interferometer Misaligned Interferometer
Beam Detector
splitter
Mirror
Laser
Lens
Mirror
A second set of lasers measures the direction of the tilt if there
is a large movement. A simplified prototype of the experiment
that operates at room temperature is already remarkably sensi­
tive, boding well for the final Archimedes apparatus’s perfor­
mance. But even with such sophisticated measurement systems,
implementing the experiment will be difficult. “In experiments
like this, the whole world works against you,” says physicist Viv­
ishek Sudhir of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
To shield the balance from the outside world, the physicists
needed a site with as little seismic activity as possible—hence Sar­
dinia. The island has other advantages. It’s not too densely pop­
ulated, which keeps human-made noise low. It also has more than
250 abandoned mines, many of them no longer in use, which are
appealing because there are even fewer vibrations underground
and because the temperature inside a mine is especially stable.
Eventually the team fixed on the Sos Enattos mine on the east
side of the island, which has been closed since the 1990s. The mine
has a long history: in ancient times, the Romans used it to extract
silver and zinc ores. Today Loddo, our driver for the trip, is respon­
sible for the shafts; he had previously worked as a technician in the
mine. “Just before it was closed, there were only about 30 people
working there,” Loddo says as he walks us through the mine. “They
then took care of converting the underground passages so that they
could be used as a museum.” A few years later he took over the
mine’s management and organized guided tours. In some areas,
there are still educational installations depicting the different steps
miners took in their work: here a figure filling a cart with rocks,
there someone attaching explosives to a wall, and elsewhere an
elaborate replica of a worker operating a pneumatic drill. “Today
the mine is used only for scientific operations,” Loddo explains.
72 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
The room where they plan to do the experiment looks more
like an archaeological site than a laboratory, with its high walls
of unadorned stone and vaulted cave ceiling. “The whole room
has already been enlarged quite a bit, but there is still a lot of
work to be done,” Calloni says. The room still has to get bigger,
for example. It needs a ventilation shaft, a proper floor, and more.
The final version of the balance setup was recently completed
and shipped to Sardinia. The vacuum chamber is at the test site,
but its two outer envelopes are still in production. When they ar­
rive and when the cave is ready, scientists will move the entire setup
to this dark underground room and start running real trials.
It’s been a long process to get to this point. “It took me about
six months to plan the setup in detail,” Errico says. “Where should
which adjusting screw go? What does the ideal beam splitter look
like, and where do you position it? It then took about a year for all
the parts to arrive and for me to put it together.” And the calibra­
tion to get the laser to hit all the fixtures accurately? “That actu­
ally only took 30 minutes. I had planned everything so precisely
that there were only a few degrees of freedom. When everything
really worked out the way I had imagined, I almost cried with joy.”
PRECISION MEASUREMENTS
Despite the team’s careful planning, the measurement will be
quite challenging, says Lamoreaux, who first demonstrated the
Casimir effect. “I have long dreamed of measuring the Casimir
force between superconducting plates,” he says. “But making a
suitable sample was beyond my capabilities.”
The experiment’s precision measurements would have to be
a factor of 10 better than the best gravitational-wave detectors
operating today, points out Karsten Danzmann, director of the
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Ger­
many. He finds the project fascinating but ambitious.
If it works, though, the results will have major consequences.
“The experiment is extremely important,” Leonhardt says, “be­
cause it would prove that vacuum fluctuations are indeed a real
quantity with a gravitational contribution.” If the measurements
match expectations and show that virtual particles interact grav­
itationally just like ordinary matter, then we will know for sure
that vacuum fluctuations must affect Einstein’s general relativ­
ity equations. Consequently, they probably have very strong ef­
fects. In that case, cosmologists will have to explain what sup­
presses the influence of vacuum energy in the universe.
If the deflections of the balance turn out differently than ex­
pected, it might mean several things. On the one hand, such a re­
sult could open the door to entirely new physics if it showed that
virtual particles don’t gravitate. But “a missing signal could also
be because there is no Casimir effect in cuprates, or it is very
weak,” says experimental physicist Markus Aspelmeyer of the
University of Vienna. “Therefore, it is even more important to
test separately from this experimentally.”
The Archimedes researchers themselves aren’t making any pre­
dictions. “We don’t want to formulate a hypothesis yet, so as not
to falsify the experiment,” Calloni says. “But whatever result we
get, it will definitely be exciting.”
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Cosmic Conundrum. C lara Moskowitz; February 2021.
s c i e n t if i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a zi n e /s a
A PROTOTYPE o  f the beam balance
is taking measurements aboveground
to predict the experiment’s sensitivity.
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 73

© 2023 Scientific American

Let’s Take
S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y

the Bus

74 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 Buses could help solve the
climate crisis—if we made
them more appealing
By Kendra Pierre-Louis
Illustration by Tavis Coburn

May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 75

© 2023 Scientific American

 Kendra Pierre-Louis is a climate reporter focusing on the
science and social impacts of climate change. She has worked
for Gimlet, the New York Times and Popular Science. Pierre-
Louis is based in New York City.

F or the past decade Seattle has been growing—fast. Between

2010 and 2020 its ­population swelled by almost a quarter. Growth
is generally good for cities, but it is often accompanied by a
dreaded problem: traffic. Yet Seattle managed to avert this cri-
sis, cutting traffic in its downtown by 10 percent and reducing
greenhouse gas emissions in the process. How did Seattle do it? By turning to
an uncommon solution: the humble bus.
Buses are among the most overlooked solutions for
decarbonizing the U.S. Transportation is the single
largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, making up
slightly less than 30 percent, according to the Environ-
mental Protection Agency. In the summer of 2022 more
than 5 percent of new auto sales in the U.S. were for
2030. But according to the report, even if there were
10 times as many EVs on the road, people would still
need to reduce their driving by 25 percent for Califor-
nia to reach its target.
The culprit is something known as vehicle fleet
turnover—that is, how long it takes to shift the mix
all-electric vehicles (EVs), signaling that electric-car of vehicles that are on the road. Even if every new
ownership had shifted from being a fad of early adopt- vehicle sold from now on were electric and directly
ers to a transportation staple. Three of the four car replaced a gas-powered car, it would still be at least
commercials that aired during this year’s Super Bowl 15 years before virtually every car on the road was
were for EVs. In January, President Joe Biden tweeted, electric. But sales of new gas cars are still higher than
“On my watch, the great American road trip is going those of EVs, which is why even the more ambitious
to be fully electrified,” alongside a photograph of him- estimates say roughly a third of cars will still be gas
self behind the wheel of an electric Hummer. in 2050.
The president has supported EVs as part of the Even if the U.S. could somehow avoid the fleet-turn-
nation’s climate plan, pledging to reduce emissions over problem, swapping gas cars one-for-one with EVs
by 50 to 52 percent by 2030. This commitment is in would create new energy needs requiring half of the
line with the aims of the Paris Agreement. But Steven country’s electricity-generating capacity, according to
Higashide, director of the Clean Transportation pro- a 2020 analysis in the journal Nature Climate Change.
gram at the Union of Concerned Scientists, cautions This demand would limit the nation’s ability to power
that “electrifying personal vehicles is necessary but other things such as air-conditioning that are neces-
not sufficient” for achieving the nation’s goals on cli- sary for health and safety in a warming world. To meet
mate change reduction. the country’s climate goals, Higashide says we’ll have
A growing body of research bolsters his point. A to drive less frequently and for shorter distances—and
2018 report by the California Air Resources Board redesign cities and neighborhoods with good mass
found that the state could not meet its 2030 climate transit options.
goals through vehicle electrification alone. At the Buses can fill a lot of those needs. It’s better if
time, California aimed to reduce greenhouse gas they’re powered by electric batteries, but even gas
emissions to 40 percent of the state’s 1990 levels by busses reduce emissions with enough riders. On aver-

76 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American

 age, cars emit almost one pound of carbon dioxide
per passenger mile. Buses, which generally run at
about 25 percent capacity, emit 0.64 pound of CO 2
per passenger mile, according to data from the
Department of Defense. If they ran full, buses would
emit 0.18 pound of CO 2 per passenger mile, making
them comparable to rail but at a much lower cost. “I
think the bus is often overlooked as a climate solu-
tion,” Higa­shide says, “because it is overlooked as a
solution, period.”
CONVERTING DRIVERS TO RIDERS
Buses have long b  een maligned in popular imagina-
tion. In movies and television shows, scriptwriters
often have characters ride the bus to telegraph to
viewers that they are facing tough times. On the HBO
series I nsecure, m
 ain character Issa Dee’s downward
spiral begins with her crashing her car and having to
ride the bus. In the ultimate bus flick, S
 peed, A
 nnie is
on the bus because her driver’s license has been
revoked—for speeding. Why else would a nice girl like
her be riding the bus in Los Angeles?
Scientific American
It would seem that buses are a hard sell in a coun-
try that loves the automobile, but research suggests
that isn’t necessarily true. According to a 2016 anal-
© 2023 Scientific American
ysis led by Higashide that looked at transit-ridership AN UNSAFE BUS
behavior among both car owners and those without stop in Staten
cars, people who live near better transit ride it more Island, N.Y.:
often regardless of whether they own a vehicle. The poorly located,
problem is that many Americans do not live near bet- lit and maintained,
ter transit. An analysis by the American Society of with no sidewalks
Civil Engineers found that 45 percent of people in the or crosswalks.
U.S. lack access to transit at all. Those who do have
transit available find it is often slow and unreliable.
The amount of time between buses or trains at a
given stop, known as headway, has a huge impact on
whether people will actually use the service. “Ten
minutes is that magic mark,” says Kari Watkins, an
associate professor of civil and environmental engi-
neering at the University of California, Davis. Wat-
kins’s research looks at how to expand mobility
through methods other than driving. When a bus
arrives every 10 minutes or less, riders don’t have to
think about when the bus is coming. This experience
mirrors the main convenience of private car owner-
ship: transportation is available when you need it.
When buses arrive every 15 or 20 minutes, “peo-
ple are still going to feel like they have to time their
trips,” Watkins says. Past that, “anybody who has a
choice is not as likely to opt for transit.” Buses that
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 77
AN ELECTRIC BUS arrive with an unpredictable cadence because of traf-
in Zaragoza, Spain fic and other factors also turn people away.
(left). In Bogotá, In this way, trains have some benefits over buses
Colombia, the because they run on a fixed schedule. The two modes
TransMilenio sys- are probably best used in a complementary way: rail
tem (right) has dedi- can carry large numbers of people in denser commu-
cated bus lanes that nities, and buses can serve to funnel people to those
run to the airport. rail lines. Even in New York City—a place well known
for its subway system—buses shuttle more than one
million riders daily. Buses are also much nimbler than
trains because they leverage an existing piece of infra-
structure: the road. Routes can be adjusted to meet
shifting needs, whereas train tracks cannot be moved.
Yet “in many parts of the country, there has been
an investment in rail without the corresponding
investment in bus service,” Higa­shide says. He points
to Denver: the city has spent billions expanding its
light rail and commuter rail systems, but “then you
get off the train, and the bus comes every hour.”
David King, a planning professor at Arizona State
University, thinks transit service, especially bus tran-
sit, is so poor in the U.S. partly because it’s treated as
a social or public service—a form of government sup-
port or assistance for disadvantaged people. Nation-
wide, transit riders are more likely to have lower
incomes than drivers, and among people who ride,
those who take the train tend to have higher incomes
than bus passengers. Bus riders are more likely to be
people with no other option.
78 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
“We usually call them transit-dependent riders,”
says Candace Brakewood, an associate professor in the
department of civil and environmental engineering at
the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “They often are
low income, can’t afford a car or perhaps have a disabil-
ity, and can’t drive or really don’t want to drive.”
Research shows, however, that if service is bad enough,
even those who are ostensibly transit-dependent will
find other ways of getting around, such as walking, bik-
ing, hitching rides and using informal transit networks.
In many cities, buses are treated as critical infra-
structure. Take Bogotá, Colombia, for instance, which
has no metro service and has roughly the same size
population as New York City. The bus rapid transit
system, TransMilenio, has priority lanes that shuttle
passengers faster than private cars during peak traf-
fic periods. Sleek, well-lit stations were carefully
planned to be accessible by sidewalk as well as by
bicycle. It’s estimated that immediately after launch-
ing in 2000, TransMilenio helped to cut air pollution
by as much 40 percent in certain locales, re­­duced car
Marcos Cebrian/Europa Press/Getty Images
fatalities by 92 percent, and even seduced some com-
muters into giving up their cars—11 percent of riders
identify as former drivers.
Higashide points out that when transit is safe, reli-
able and fast, like it is with TransMilenio, it can feel like
a public luxury. That term, whose recent popularity
traces back to writer and activist George Monbiot,
refers to services and experiences that feel luxurious

but are intended for public consumption. Instead of
private pools, it’s public pools that are clean, properly
staffed and open during the hours when you’d actually
like to go. It’s big, keystone parks such as Griffith Park
in Los Angeles and Central Park in New York, but it’s
also the well-tended neighborhood playground with
swings that glide effortlessly. At its core, public luxury
is the idea that “the good stuff” doesn’t have to be
locked up in private ownership. Owning a car, after all,
comes with its own set of headaches. A bus system like
TransMilenio makes choosing transit over driving
almost pleasurable rather than a sacrifice.
In addition to running fast and frequently, a bus
system that feels like a public luxury will have routes
that take riders to the places they want to go (the
movies, a friend’s house, a museum), as well as the
places they need to go (work, the doctor’s office). Bus
stops will be well marked in safe locations, with seat-
ing and protection from sun and rain.
Because most riders get to bus stops by walking,
sidewalks and other surrounding infrastructure are
needed, too. In 2011 a child in Georgia was killed by a
hit-and-run driver while he and his family were cross-
ing the street to get to their bus stop. The stop was
ChandraDhas/Getty Images
located directly across from their apartment complex,
but crossing the street via the nearest crosswalk would
have meant walking an additional two thirds of a mile.
Well-designed bus systems allow people who can’t
drive or simply don’t want to—such as older people
© 2023 Scientific American
and people with certain disabilities—to get around.
They also enable older children and teens who are
too young to drive to transport themselves from home
to school and to extracurricular activities on their
own, freeing up parents’ time. And riders tend to have
a special relationship with buses in part because of
their drivers. “If you’re doing a trip regularly, it’s nice
to know the person you’re traveling with,” Watkins
says. It’s the feeling that “they’re looking out for you.”
BETTER BUSES, BETTER CITIES
Beyond emissions, there are other reasons to want
fewer people driving. In addition to the climate cri-
sis, we also have “a justice crisis, a safety crisis and
an economic crisis, all of which come together on our
roadways,” King says. Their solutions, he adds, can
come from the roadways, too.
It’s no mystery that significant investment is needed
to make bus transit viable. In 2022 Antelope Valley in
northeastern California became the first municipality
to unveil an all-electric bus fleet. The upgrade cost
roughly $80 million, or about $1 million per bus. But
the Antelope Valley Transit Authority notes that the
upgrades came with savings—the electric fleet’s first 10
million miles saved the agency $3.3 million in avoided
fuel costs. The new buses also emitted 59 million fewer
pounds of CO 2 over the same distance.
Municipalities aren’t the only ones saving money.
Cars have long been considered a ticket to the middle
class partly because it’s difficult to find work in most
places without one. On average, Americans spend
about 13 percent of their income on transportation;
those with the lowest incomes spend nearly 30 per-
cent. Nationwide, car debt totals more than $1.4 tril-
lion and is projected to grow. Buses can reduce eco-
nomic pressures and increase access to opportunity.
Fewer drivers on the road will also save lives. More
than 40,000 people are killed in motor vehicle crashes
every year in the U.S. Compared with their gas coun-
terparts, EVs are heavier and can accelerate faster.
Political will—the risk of angering drivers by giv-
ing up public roadways to public transit in particu-
lar—is often the biggest hurdle to implementing
changes. But Seattle has shown it can be done. “King
County Metro in Seattle had a whole group dedicated
to speed and reliability,” Watkins says. Between 2010
and 2017 the city’s ridership grew, bucking nation-
wide trends that saw bus ridership decline by 15 per-
cent between 2012 and 2018.
At a time when we need to collaboratively act on
climate change, Higashide says that riding the bus
reminds us that “we’re making decisions that affect
each other.”
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Urban Planning in Curitiba. Jonas Rabinovitch and Josef Leitman; March 1996.
s c i e n t if i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a zi n e /s a
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 79

MIND MATTERS
Edited by Daisy Yuhas
Friends Can
Make Things
Very Scary
Haunted houses reveal how friends
and strangers shape our fears
By Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik
From Marie Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors to Disneyland’s
Haunted Mansion to horror-themed escape rooms, haunted house
attractions have terrified and delighted audiences around the
world for more than 200 years. Today thousands of haunted hous-
es operate in the U.S. alone.
These attractions turn out to be good places to study fear. They
help scientists understand the body’s response to fright and how
we perceive some situations as enjoyably thrilling and others as
truly terrible. One surprising finding: having friends close at hand
in a haunted house might make you more jumpy, not less so.
In a 2022 study, scientists teamed up with The 17th Door, an
immersive haunted experience in Fullerton, Calif. The roughly
30-minute walkthrough at The 17th Door, set in a fictitious peni-
tentiary, has included mimicked suffocation, actual electric
shocks, live cockroaches, brief submersion in water and being shot
with pellets by a firing squad while blindfolded. Guests are given
a safe word to exit the experience: “Mercy.”
Psychologist and study co-author Sarah Tashjian, who is now
at the University of Melbourne, and her team conducted their re-
search with 156 adults, who each wore a wireless wrist sensor dur-
80 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
Susana Martinez-Conde a nd Stephen Macknik
are professors of ophthalmology, neur­ol­ogy, and
physiology and pharma­cology at SUNY Down­
state Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Along with Sandra Blakeslee, they are authors
of the Prisma Prize–winning Sleights of Mind.
ing their visit. The sensor measured skin responses linked to the
body’s reactions to stress and other situations. When the sensor
picked up, for example, greater skin conductance—that is, the de-
gree to which the skin can transmit an electric current—that was
a sign that the body was more aroused and ready for fight or flight.
In addition to this measure, people reported their expected fear
(on a scale of 1 to 10) before entering the haunted house and their
experienced fear (on the same scale) after completing the haunt.
The scientists found that people who reported greater fear also
showed heightened skin responses. Being with friends, Tashjian
and her colleagues further found, increased physiological arous-
al during the experience, which was linked to stronger feelings of
fright. In fact, the fear response was actually weaker when people
went through the house in the presence of strangers.
Although Tashjian and her colleagues had initially wondered
whether friends might make the experience less harrowing, she
feels their study’s findings also make sense. “Because the haunted
house was entertaining and exciting, as well as scary, it is possible
that being with people you know made the entire experience more
arousing,” Tashjian explains. “There was likely a contagious feed-
back loop with friends that wasn’t as strong among strangers.”
Other investigators have used haunted houses to understand
how fear and enjoyment can coexist. In a 2020 study led by Marc
Malmdorf Andersen, a member of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aar-
hus University in Denmark, scientists joined forces with Dystopia
Haunted House. The Danish attraction includes such terrifying ex-
periences as being chased by “Mr. Piggy,” a large, chain-saw-wield-
ing man wearing a bloody butcher’s apron and pig mask. People
between the ages of 12 and 57 were video recorded at peak moments
during the attraction, wore heart-rate monitors throughout and re-
ported on their experience. People’s fright was tied to large-scale
heart-rate fluctuations; their enjoyment was linked to small-scale
ones. The results suggest that fear and enjoyment can happen to-
gether when physiological arousal is balanced “just right.”
An earlier study led by Mathias Clasen of Aarhus Uni-
versity also used Dystopia Haunted House to gain in-
sight into how “adrenaline junkies” and “white-knuck-
lers” manage their fear. Some visitors applied strategies
to minimize fear, such as closing their eyes. Others
sought out scary stimuli to maximize terror. Both groups
reported similar levels of satisfaction, suggesting that
people upregulate and downregulate their fear arousal
for an optimal experience.
Understanding these patterns has real-world benefits.
Tashjian notes that learning what factors amplify and re-
duce threat responses can help people with post-traumat-
ic stress disorder or anxiety. She adds that you can help
to consciously regulate your body’s fear response “by prac-
ticing deep-breathing exercises or meditation [and] mind-
fulness.” These practices can benefit many people facing
stressful or threatening experiences in day-to-day life.
But in the meantime, if you want to get really scared
at your next haunted house, keep your eyes open, lean
into the scary moments—and bring some friends along.
Illustration by James Olstein
THE UNIVERSE
The Blast That
Shook the World
A decade ago Earth suffered its largest
asteroid impact in more than a century
By Phil Plait
Ten years ago, a  s the sun rose over Chelyabinsk, Russia, the
sky exploded.
On February 15, 2013, an asteroid slammed into Earth’s atmo-
sphere at nearly 70,000 kilometers per hour. Almost the size of a
tennis court, it blazed brilliantly in the sky as if a second sun had
appeared and begun racing from southeast to northwest.
Ramming through the air at hypersonic velocities blow-
torched the surface of the asteroid, which left behind a thick trail
of vaporized rock as it screamed over Earth. The immense pres-
sure started to flatten it (scientists call this “pancaking”), and the
force finally overcame the asteroid some 40 kilometers above the
ground. It crumbled into smaller chunks, each one still traveling
at more than a dozen times the speed of a bullet fired from a rifle.
These fragments also pancaked, creating a series of brief but
powerful flashes of light as they heated to incandescence. The
remaining pieces vaporized.
All of this happened in mere seconds, with the ultimate blow
occurring when the asteroid was about 30 kilometers up. The
energy of its last motion was converted into heat in an instant.
The resulting huge fireball briefly outshone the sun in the sky,
emitting energy equivalent to the detonation of about half a mil-
lion metric tons of TNT.
The shock wave from this explosion traveled away from the
blast, taking about a minute and a half to reach downtown Chel-
yabinsk, roughly 40 kilometers to the north. The industrial city of
a million people was just starting its day when the apparition
blazed across the sky. The awesome spectacle and the long, linger-
ing vapor trail brought people outside or to their windows to see
what happened—and that’s when the shock wave touched down.
A tremendous thunderclap shattered windows all over the
city, and flying glass was the source of most of the injuries to the
roughly 1,500 people harmed in the event. Fortunately, no one
was killed, and infrastructure damage was relatively minimal.
Had the asteroid been bigger or made of metal or if it had
plunged downward at a steeper angle, this story could have
been quite different, the aftermath far more severe.
Chelyabinsk was a wake-up alarm for Earth—a loud one.
It was also a major learning experience for scientists, as it
was the largest known atmospheric impact since the Tunguska
bolide in 1908. The asteroid’s smoking trail was viewed by sat-
ellites as well as by thousands of eyewitnesses and cameras.
Meteorites rained widely, including one monster half-ton chunk
1.5 meters across that plunged into a frozen lake and was later
recovered. There’s even security-camera footage of that piece
82 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
crashing, creating a dramatic plume of snow and water shoot-
ing up into the air.
The meteorites recovered from the event revealed the aster-
oid’s violent history. Shock veins riddled them, leaving narrow
fissures. These showed that the 19-meter-wide Chelyabinsk rock
was once part of a much larger asteroid that itself had suffered
an impact, which broke off the piece that smashed into Earth
and cracked it throughout. Radioactive dating indicated that the
first impact may have occurred as long as 4.4 billion years ago,
when the solar system was less than 200 million years old. Those
fissures in the Chelyabinsk rock weakened it, allowing it to more
easily disintegrate high above the ground and create that mas-
sive shock wave. The ghostly fingers of an ancient deep-space
impact had reached out and touched the lives of thousands of
Russian people that day.
It’s not clear which asteroid may have been the parent aster-
oid. Scientists traced the trajectory of the Chelyabinsk impactor
backward into space and found consistent matches to asteroids
2007 BD7 and 2011 EO40. One may be the parent body, but it
remains uncertain.
An analysis of Chelyabinsk, together with smaller, lower-
energy events, showed that these kinds of impactors affect us
much more frequently than previously thought. A Chelyabinsk-
size impact happens every 25 years or so, with most occurring
over the ocean or wilderness areas, thankfully.
It’s a bit alarming that astronomers didn’t see this asteroid
coming long before it hit us. But asteroids tend to be very dark,
and small ones are extremely faint even when close to our plan-
et. Just a few years earlier the four-meter-wide asteroid 2008 TC3
became the first one ever detected before striking Earth. Only
six others have been discovered before impact since then,
including 2023 CX1, which lit up the English Channel on Febru-
ary 13, 2023, as if marking the week’s anniversary. All were small,
posing no danger to us on the ground.
Now, after I’ve terrified you about impacts from these
ob­jects, comes the good news: we’re getting much better at find-
ing them. In the decade since Chelyabinsk, about 20,000 near-
Earth asteroids have been discovered—more than had been
found in all of history up to 2013. New survey telescopes such as
Pan-STARRS and the Zwicky Transient Facility have come
online, and better detection and analysis techniques have been
developed that accelerated the rate of discovery. Soon the huge
Vera Rubin Observatory and nasa’s NEO Surveyor space mis-
sion will also significantly boost the number of known Earth-
threatening asteroids.
Finding them, though, is just the first step. Doing some-
thing about them is the next. To that end, in November 2021
nasa launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)
mission, which slammed a half-ton impactor into the 170-
meter-wide asteroid Dimorphos—a moon of the larger asteroid
Didymos. The momentum from the collision changed the orb­
it­al period of the asteroid by more than half an hour. That was
an even bigger shift than had been predicted—a vast plume of
material that the impact excavated and flung away from the

Contrails left by the Chelyabinsk meteor over Russia
asteroid’s surface added a kick—showing that it’s possible to
use such a spacecraft to alter an asteroid’s trajectory.
Bigger blasts might be able to divert an incoming space rock
as well. Detonating a nuclear weapon near a small asteroid
could vaporize much of its surface. This hot vapor would rapid-
ly expand, acting like rocket exhaust and pushing the asteroid
into a new and, one hopes, safer trajectory. Some issues regard-
ing this method are still fairly difficult to overcome—it’s cur-
rently illegal under the Outer Space Treaty to explode nuclear
devices in space, for example—but a dangerous asteroid headed
our way might grease the skids a bit on a political fix.
Since the Chelyabinsk impact, two spacecraft have not only
approached small asteroids but also collected samples from
them; one, Hayabusa2, already dropped off its samples back at
Earth, and the other, OSIRIS-REx, will do so later this year.
Both asteroids, Ryugu (roughly one kilometer across) and Ben-
Alex Alishevskikh
nu (500 meters across), are essentially rubble piles, loose col-
lections of small rocks held together by their own meager grav-
ity. It’s likely all small asteroids are rubble piles, which will
© 2023 Scientific American
Phil Plait is a professional astronomer and science communicator
in Colorado. He writes the Bad Astronomy Newsletter. Follow him
on Twitter @BadAstronomer
affect how we fend them off; their weak structures mean they
can absorb the impact of a spacecraft more easily. Imagine
trying to punch a box of packing peanuts, and you’ll get the
idea. The DART mission showed, however, that copious amounts
of material are ejected after a collision, and that transfer of mo­­
ment­um can actually increase the effect of an impact.
Chelyabinsk caught us by surprise, and although such small
impacts may still sneak past our guard, we’re getting better at
finding potential threats from space and learning what we can
do if we find one with Earth in its crosshairs. Big, dangerous
asteroids are rare, yet we need only look to Meteor Crater in
Arizona to see why we need to take them seriously. The explo-
sion from that impact, estimated as 10 to 40 megatons, carved
a hole more than a kilometer across in the desert about 50,000
years ago, probably devastating the plants and animals living
there at the time. This might be one of the most recent large
direct impacts Earth has suffered, but it won’t be the last.
Unless, of course, we do something to stop them.
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 83
REVIEWS
Edited by Amy Brady

A Tricky Itch
to Scratch
When it comes to diagnosing
and treating allergies, there are
no easy answers
Decades after her father’s terrifying death
from a bee sting, Theresa MacPhail learned
that she, too, had allergies. The surprising
diagnosis came after she contracted four
respiratory infections in less than a year and
made visits to specialists. What caused the
seemingly sudden onset of her allergies?
Unimpressed by the books she found in
her search for answers, MacPhail, a medi-
cal anthropologist, began writing Allergic
as a “personal and scientific journey to di-
agnose the problem of allergy in the twen-
ty-first century.” The result is a meticulous
study of respiratory, food and skin allergies
in three parts—diagnosis, theory and treat-
ment—told through patients’ stories and
expert interviews.
The book begins in doctors’ offices,
where frustrations abound. People may
itch, cough and wheeze in response to aller-
gens without showing an important diag-
nostic sign of an allergic response: height-
ened levels of immunoglobulin E anti­bodies.
Others may have positive antibody tests but
suffer no other clinical symptoms. Re-
searchers are working on better tests, but
MacPhail is focused mainly on the problem
of health-care inaccessibility. Even when
improved technologies arrive, she says, it is
likely that only a few will benefit from them.
When MacPhail shifts from the person-
al to the global, ambiguity remains. What is
driving the troubling upward trend in aller-
Allergic: gy prevalence worldwide? Perhaps it’s be-
Our Irritated cause climate change is lengthening pollen
Bodies in seasons, or maybe our modern hygiene
a Changing habits are removing beneficial microbes
World from our skin and increasing its permeabili-
by Theresa ty. Each theory has its merits and shortfalls,
MacPhail. and in combination, they might explain our
Random House, growing sensitivities.
2023 ($28.99) Treatments come with their own chal-
lenges and personal assessments. For a pea-
nut-sensitive child, months of oral immuno-
therapy starting with very low doses are
vital to prevent anaphylaxis, whereas for
a man with eczema, instant relief from im-
mune-enzyme-modulating JAK inhibitors
may be worth the long-term risk of heart
disease. Yet clinical interventions alone
won’t be enough to control the allergy epi-
demic fueled by our changing environments.
That requires policies that phase out fossil
fuels, improve air quality and fund more
allergy research into underlying causes.
MacPhail makes the argument that as
scientists continue to disentangle the bio-
logical complexities of allergies, we also
need societal shifts to soothe our increas-
ingly irritated world. —Fionna M. D. Samuels

IN BRIEF

Titanium Noir
by Nick Harkaway. Knopf, 2023 ($28)
Sharp as a shiv b ut wickedly playful,
Nick Harkaway’s near-future noir
sends Cal Sounder, an all too human
detective, into the realm of literal
giants. This future’s richest people can
indulge in titanium 7 rejuvenation therapy, which
“turns the body’s clock back” to restart puberty,
making adults young again—and, with each new
dose, increasingly huge. The apparent murder of a
titan sets Sounder on a classic hard-boiled mystery
case, with a detective’s-eye view of the lowest and
highest echelons of a fascinating city, plus rigorously
imagined speculative genetic science and its conse-
quences. Harkaway’s trademarks abound: brisk dia-
logue, wild set pieces and dead-serious consider-
ations of humanity’s next evolution. —  Alan Scherstuhl
In the Herbarium: T he Hidden World Every Brain Needs Music:
of Collecting and Preserving Plants T he Neuroscience of Making and
by Maura C. Flannery. Listening to Music
Yale University Press, 2023 ($35) by Larry S. Sherman and Dennis Plies.
Columbia University Press, 2023 ($32)
Historically, h erbaria—collections of
dried, pressed and labeled plants— In the 17 years s ince the popular book
have been tied to political and eco- T his Is Your Brain on Music was pub-
nomic power. They played key roles in lished, functional MRI has allowed sci-
scientific achievements such as Carl entists to visualize how music shapes
Linnaeus’s development of binomial nomenclature the brain during composition, perfor-
and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Biologist mance and listening. Now a neuroscientist, Larry S.
Maura C. Flannery makes a compelling case for rein- Sherman, and a professional musician, Dennis Plies,
vigorating the relevance of these “hidden gardens” by have collaborated on their own version, which puts
exploring their significance as bellwethers of climate academic analysis in conversation with feedback
change, libraries for biodiversity research, sources of from dozens of composers and musicians. Music, the
plant DNA, and opportunities to acknowledge and authors write, creates cells in the brain that act like
amend the erasure of Indigenous and enslaved peo- disco balls in a space full of lamps: it “turns your living
ple’s contributions to botany.  —Dana Dunham room into a party every time.”  —Maddie Bender

84 Scientific American, May 2023 Illustration by London Ladd

© 2023 Scientific American

OBSERVATORY
K E E PIN G A N E Y E O N S C IE N C E
Social Security
and Science
Attacks on the program rest on
false “facts” similar to ones used
against climate change action
By Naomi Oreskes
Whether they work on climate change, evolution, vaccine safe-
ty, or any of a host of other issues, scientists frequently face resis-
tance from people offering “alternative facts.” How did we come
to live in a world where so many people feel vaguely supported
opinions are just as valid as evidence-based scientific research—
where people can’t tell the difference between opinion and fact?
Part of the answer involves the long-standing efforts of the
tobacco industry to deny evidence about tobacco’s harms and of
the fossil-fuel industry to confound understanding about climate
change. These campaigns have undermined confidence in the
idea that large amounts of scientific evidence produce a more
accurate view of the world than do a few dissenting thoughts.
But there’s another source for these doubts: the attack of con-
servative politicians on the U.S. Social Security program, which
gives financial security to senior citizens. Republicans in Con-
gress have recently threatened drastic cuts to Social Security and
even privatization. Their ostensible reason is the need to balance
the federal budget. “The numbers can’t work” without big cuts to
Social Security, former Republican finance committee aide Chris
Campbell has declared. In fact, Social Security isn’t a drain on the
federal budget; it pays for itself through a dedicated payroll tax.
Why do conservatives keep attacking a successful program
that pays for itself? Because of its success. Social Security is “big
86 Scientific American, May 2023
© 2023 Scientific American
Naomi Oreskes i s a professor of the history of science at
Harvard University. She is author of Why Trust Science?
(Princeton University Press, 2019) and co-author of T he Big Myth
(Bloomsbury, 2023).
government” that works. Its accomplishments refute the conser-
vative refrain that federal programs are costly failures and that
the government should just leave things to the free market.
Most federal programs that conservatives love to hate were
implemented in response to the failures of free markets. In the
late 19th century anticompetitive business practices strangled
markets and replaced them with monopolies. In the early 20th
century one in every 1,000 U.S. workers was killed on the job. In
the 1930s millions of able-bodied Americans were thrown out of
work and onto breadlines through no fault of their own.
It wasn’t the private sector that fixed these problems. It was
government, particularly the federal government. The Sherman
Antitrust Act of 1890 was passed to protect competition. Workers’
compensation laws ensured that people injured on the job would
receive redress. Laws were passed to limit child labor, expand
access to education and—during the Great Depression—rescue
American capitalism from a state of near collapse. Unsupported
“alternative facts” frequently surfaced in debates over these pro-
grams. They appeared in later arguments over Social Security, too.
From its first payouts in 1937 through 1974, Social Security
ran in the black; there were never more than two years in a row
when the program had to draw on its own trust fund. From 1975
to 1981, however, the program ran deficits, and demographics
suggested that things would get worse. In the early 1980s the
Reagan administration suggested cutting benefits to make the
budget look more balanced—without raising taxes or cutting
military spending. This idea emboldened antigovernment ideo-
logues who wanted to eliminate Social Security altogether by
giving it to the private sector.
Congressional Republicans passed the baton to a “blue rib-
bon” committee led by famed economist Alan Green­span, a lib-
ertarian. He has made the case for some privatization by (false-
ly) claiming that the program was irretrievably broken. Social
Security was not in fact broken. Rather, like any 50-year-old
thing, it needed some maintenance, and with modest
adjustments to benefits and small payroll tax increas-
es, the system was soon back on track.
The antigovernment forces tried again in the mid-
2000s, aided by business interests. But polls showed
that the more President George W. Bush talked about
privatizing Social Security, the less the American peo-
ple supported him, so he backed down.
Twenty years later we are in a similar place, but rea-
soned discussion is blocked by ideology that ignores
evidence. This is the same fruitless dynamic that stalls
action on the climate crisis. Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan of New York popularized the adage that
“everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own
facts.” Moynihan could have been talking about science,
but he said this during a debate over Social ­Security.
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
Illustration by Izhar Cohen
 S cienti f ic A m erican O N L I N E
FIND ORIGINAL ARTICLES AND IMAGES
IN THE Scientific American ARCHIVES AT
scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa
50, 100 & 150 YEARS AGO
IN N OVATI O N A N D D I S C OV E RY A S C H R O NI C L E D IN S c ientific A meric an
Compiled by Mark Fischetti

M ay

1973 Computer
Privacy
“There is growing concern that
vitamin class called A, B and C have
been differentiated with certainty,
and it is possible that more exist.
described as terrible, but all were
in comparatively good health.”

computers constitute a dangerous They do not appear to be of one Tidal Power

threat to privacy. Since many com-
puters contain personal data and
are accessible from distant termi-
nals, they are viewed as an unex-
celled means of assembling large
amounts of information about an
individual or a group. It may soon
be feasible to compile dossiers
on an entire citizenry. However,
a computer system can be adapted
to guard its contents. Crypto-
graphic encipherment can be
achieved in two different ways:
by ciphers or by codes. A cipher
always assigns substitute symbols
to some given set of alphabet let-
ters. A code can convey only mean-
ings thought of in advance and
provided for in a secret list such as
a code book. Other cryptographic
approaches are still being studied.”
chemical type, and are effective in
very small amounts. The green tis-
sues of plants would seem to be
1973 the chief site of vitamin synthesis.”
Call It Insulin
“A product by the name of insulin
has been prepared by Canadian
biologists in Toronto, which is
claimed to be a specific [remedy]
against diabetes. The preparation
is made from the pancreas of cattle,
1923 sheep and swine.”
1873  olaris L ost,
P
Survivors Found
“Telegraphic despatches bring the
news of the probable loss of the
United States exploring steamer
Polaris a nd the end of the Arctic
expedition. On the 15th of October, the sound ceases the moment they
1873 1872, a party of the crew, some nine- are brought in contact. If the posi-
“A trial recently took place of
Edward W. Morton’s machine,
at the East River. The machine
works by means of a ‘float’ which,
as it rises and falls with the waves
or the tide, propels the machinery
to which it may be attached. At
the trial it was geared to a saw, and
worked with the full rapidity of
a circular saw run by steam power,
although, perhaps, not quite
so uniformly.”
Music from Fire
“If into a glass tube two flames be
introduced, at a distance of one
third the length of the pipe, these
flames will vibrate in unison. The
phenomenon continues as long as
the flames remain separate, but

1923 King Tut’s

Bountiful Tomb
“Biban el-Muluk, the valley of the
kings’ tombs, is a wild, desolate
region behind the western plain
of Thebes. Some 60 tombs in the
valley were already known. On
November 5, 1922, Howard Carter
came upon a step cut in the rock
under the path leading to the
tomb of Ramses VI. The steps and
passages of the L-shaped approach
were cleared, leading to Tuten­
khamon’s tomb. The ante-chamber
is the source of practically all the
treasures removed this year. When
we think of how much still lies
within the tomb, it means work
for two years or more if they are
to be properly conserved, recorded
and evaluated.”
S cientific American, Vol. 228, No. 5; May 1973
teen souls, left the ship to place
some provisions on an ice floe.
A severe storm came on, causing
tion of the flames be varied, the
sound decreases. M. Kastner has
constructed a new musical instru-
the Polaris to part her moorings; ment of a very peculiar timbre,
the comrades on the ice, to their closely resembling that of the
dismay, saw their vessel disappear. human voice. The ‘pyrophone’ has
The tide and wind, it seems, fortu- three key boards; each key is in
nately drove the great floe, bear- communication with the conduit
ing the survivors, down through pipes of the flames in the glass
Baffin’s Bay and Davis’ straits until, tubes. By pressing upon the keys,
on the 30th of April, they were the flames separate and sound is
rescued after 196 days on the ice, produced. When the pressure is re­­
by the British steamer T  igress. The moved, it is instantly stilled by the
1973, Infrared sufferings of the rescued party are junction of the flames.”
Boa: “ A boa
constrictor has
sensitive organs
that can detect
the heat radia­
tion emitted by
its prey. When
the system de­­

tects an infrared
Classy Vitamins stimulus, the tri­
“The discovery of vitamins was gem­inal nerve
carries a signal
made by [Frederick Gowland]
to the brain. A
Hopkins only as recently as 1912. response can be
The indispensability of these sub- recorded from
stances is now generally accepted. the brain within
Three substances of the so-called 35 milliseconds.”

May 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 87

© 2023 Scientific American

 GRAPHIC SCIENCE
Text by Clara Moskowitz | Graphic by Emily V. Dutrow and MSJONESNYC

These two plots show two different

ways of categorizing dog breeds—
Terriers one based on human-defined groupings
Sheepdogs Conventional
and another based on “lineages”
and Cattle dogs Breed Groups derived from genetic data. In both
Retrievers, Superimposed on the genetic plots, each of the 4,000 dots repre­
flushing dogs and plot, this chart shows the breed sents an individual dog. Their positions
water dogs categories the Fédération (identical in both plots) reflect how
Sighthounds Cynologique Internationale uses to closely genetically related they are
group dogs. Each color represents to other dogs—two nearby dots are
a distinct group. In some cases, genetically similar, and two distant
the groupings cover wide dots diverge more.
Companion and toy dogs genetic territory.

Pinschers, Newly
Schnauzers, Established Lineages
Pointing dogs Spitz and Molossoids and
primitive Swiss dogs In this plot, the researchers ignored
Dachshunds types breed categories and used the genetic
data to derive 10 natural groups, or lineages,
to organize dogs (color coded, below). Dot
Mixed, unknown or opacity reflects how closely related a dog is
unrecognized breed, to other dogs in the data set: dark dots are
village dogs and more genetically distinct, whereas
Scenthounds light dots often share connections
wild canids
and related breeds with dogs outside their
own lineage.

Terrier

Herder

The DNA of Retriever

Sighthound

Dog Breeds Dingo

When it comes to traits, Asian Spitz

 ol. 185; December 8, 2022 (reference)

genetics-based lineages
are more telling than breed
There are 356 unique breeds o  f dog, accord- Pointer-Spaniel

Source: “Domestic Dog Lineages Reveal Genetic Drivers of Behavioral Diversification,”

ing to the Fédération Cynologique Internationale, Sled
the largest global organization of national kennel
clubs. Yet understanding the genetic drivers for the by Emily V. Dutrow, James A. Serpell and Elaine A. Ostrander, in C ell, V

behavioral traits that set these breeds apart has been

a long-standing scientific challenge. In a recent study,
scientists compiled DNA sequences for more than 4,000
domesticated and wild dogs to uncover the genetic connec-
tions between them and found that they sometimes defy the con-
ventional, human-made breed categories. Instead of assuming that
some breeds were related to others, the researchers found a new
way to group dogs based on their genetics.
The analysis revealed that dogs fall into 10 “lineage” groups with
close genetic connections. To see whether dogs in each lineage
shared similar traits, the scientists combined their data with behav-
ioral surveys filled out by the owners of around 46,000 purebred
dogs. They found that many traits were common among members
African and
Middle Eastern
Scenthound
of each lineage and that certain genetic variants might be relat-
ed to these traits. “We found a series of genes that turned out to
be important in brain development in herding breeds,” says
Elaine A. Ostrander of the National Human Genome Research
Institute, a co-author on the study in C ell. “ That’s a great jump-
ing-off point to study how herding dogs herd.”

88 Scientific American, May 2023

© 2023 Scientific American